Best CD burner for Sega CD games?

You see the title. I have tried almost 10 CD burners I've had laying around yet all of them will just get to the "SEGA" screen and freeze up, every single game, every single CD. They all burn at 8X at the lowest speed. Do I need a lower speed CD burner? If so, can you guys recommend one for me for under $40? I am cool with SATA, SCSI, or IDE.

 

How many Sega CD units do you have?
If it's just that one maybe it has nothing to do with the CD burners.

 

are you following a guide of some sort or just trying to burn the image?

 

Are you using CD-Rs or CD-RWs? I know it may sound like a stupid question but I've made that mistake before. If you are using CD-Rs, it may be the CDs you are using. I use Verbatim Vinyl CD-Rs and they work perfectly.

It could also be the file you are using. I burned two images before to test out some games I was looking to buy. Sonic CD (USA version) works perfectly fine on both an emulator and my actual Sega CD while the Sega Arcade Classics 4 in 1 image only worked in an emulator. The nice thing about Kega Fusion is that you can play legitimate Sega CD/Mega CD games in it if you pop the retail CD into your CD drive and tell Fusion to use your CD drive. The 4 in 1 burned disc worked in Fusion but not on my Sega CD model 1.

I'm using a modern HP Pavilion g7 notebook laptop to burn discs.

 

I have one, and I know it works fine. It plays real Sega CD games fine, as well as burnt music CDs.

I download the BIN/CUE and open the .CUE file in ImgBurn, like everyone else does.

I have tried a few brands of CDRs, specifically Sony, Verbatim, and Memorex. I've tried 10 games, all of them yield the same result. One time, I burnt a copy of Sonic CD and that worked, but was really slow to load, so I trashed it thinking it would ruin my console if I kept loading stuff with it. So, a Pavilion G7? Hmm.... Can try to find a replacement drive on eBay and try to hook it up.

But seriously guys, I am not new to this or stupid.

 

Okay, so it works in KEGA Fusion like MonkeyBoy said. The laser on the X'Eye needs a lower speed of burn in order to read it. The only reason I can do it on my PC is the fact that it can read CDRs up to 48X speed. On the X'Eye, it will only read at a lower speed. Which is why I need to burn it slower.

 

I just chose auto or max (can't remember) in Imgburn. I think the Sega CD uses a 1x drive. It might be a 2x but I do remember reading somewhere that it is a 1x. Have you tried those speeds?

 

Can't, because I don't have any drives slow enough, hence why I asked here on what the best drive was.

 

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Yes, it does. If you burn something at 1x, than it will easily be read by a 1x laser. Simple as that. There is no need to fix the laser.

 

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Just my 2 cents, but I've burned Mega/Sega CD games in the past at the max rated speed for the drives I've had, and they worked fine on both my model 1's and my model 2.

One thought just occurred. Are you burning PAL images to play on a NTSC console? or vice versa. Sega/Mega CD has no copy protection, but does have pretty good region protection. Some games converted with Convscd/ScdConv have booting or running issues. Try backing up one of your region originals and see if you can replicate the problem.

 

No, it really is not as simple as that. The advice to burn at the lowest possible speed has nothing to do with the read speed, but is related to the fact that the 1st generation CD-Rs required a lot of write power, and the early drives had comparatively low-powered laser diodes in them, so the lower speed you wrote the disc, the better chances you had of getting a high readback amplitude. This was, somewhat ironically, made worse by the relative instability of Cyanine dyes - this forced the disk makers to add stabilizers to increase their resistance to UV light, but this had the side effect of increasing the laser power required, since it also decreased their sensitivity to the 780nm IR produced by the recording laser in a CD-R drive - this was the reason that the old Cyanine discs generally maxed out at about 4x write speed.

The next development were the discs based on Phthalocyanine - this dye is considerably more stable to UV than Cyanine is, and hence didn't need added stabilizers - it was also easier to thermally degrade, so you could get away with using a much lower write power than was needed for Cyanine discs. The first generation of these disks bumped up the write speed to 8x-12x, and this subsequently increased as higher power laser diodes (and better servos) became available.

The consequence of this is that if you burn a disc rated for high-speed operation (I.E. has sensitive short strategy dye) on a drive designed for high speed operation (I.E. has a powerful laser diode) at low speeds then the power control in the drive has to pull back the laser power to a very low level, and this can cause inconsistent burns. The flip side of this is that the lower speed makes it easier for the drive to track the pregroove, so there is normally a sweet spot somewhere in the middle of the rated speed range of the drive where you get the lowest overall error rate.

Having said all this, if you have a box of old Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs and an old (say 1x-4x) CD burner then you absolutely should burn them at 1x, and you will get excellent burns (as long as the discs haven't degraded in storage) - but that doesn't mean that using the lowest speed is always the best idea with modern media.

Incidentally, the fact that you can read the discs on your PC CD-Rom drive doesn't really give you much useful information - PC CD-Rom drives (at least the ones made in the last 20 years or so) are normally designed to be able to read CD-RW discs, and they have a substantially lower readback signal amplitude than either pressed CDs or write-once CD-Rs. As a result, CD-RW capable drives have a programmable gain amplifier in the optical pickup chain, and if they detect a poor signal they will turn up the read channel gain to try and improve it - and this works just as well on marginal CD-Rs as it does on the naturally lower signal level from a CD-RW. Devices like the Sega CD don't have this capability so they are stuck with whatever the design gain of the optical pickup was - and that would have been chosen to be optimal for pressed CDs.

 

Okay, so use old media and burn slow. Gotcha. But still, I see no 1x-4x CD drives anywhere.

 

"Gotcha" what?

All my burns are min 8x, and they work so STOP thinking you are after a 1x-4x burner as the only option.

My burner is old but nowadays I leave it to max speed (20x) .... when it burns via ImgBurn I can see that the beginning of the CD is at 8x, then at 10 min it switches to 12x, then at around 40 min it's 16x and (uselessly I may add) at 72 mins or so it switches at 20x (as if that mattered at that point).

FYI: I use a 10y old portable Matshita UJ 831S that I put in a USB enclosure, so nothing really special about it.

Consider having to tinker with the gain of the MegaCD CD reader.
Successfully reading music at 1x is different, and obviously pressed CD should work.

I had to muck up with the gains on both my 3DO and my Amiga CD32, the 3DO would really give me issues, the CD32 would skip during FMV playback. There's usually some potentiometer you can play with if you care. They are still not 100% but I'd say I am happy with the results now.

If I take your words literally you already tried 10 different burners, I would focus on the SegaCD unit instead.

BTW I found out that with these CDRs all my burns work much better:
http://www.amazon.com/Overprinted-Taiyo-JVC-Grade-Overprints/dp/B007AB8ZE0

 

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Most drives will still write at 1x on long strategy media - although it has to be admitted that it's a lot more likely to be bug-free on the older ones simply because it got used more when they were designed. I just checked with the drives I have here and an old Taiyo Yuden CR-R, and the only thing that wasn't willing to try and write it was my BD-R drive.

But, seriously, modern media written at moderate write speeds should work fine - it does give you a slightly weaker signal than the old Cyanine CD-Rs did, but if that's the difference between it working and not, then you have a marginal CD reader anyway. If you want to do a really objective comparison then get access to a scope and connect it to pin 5 of the KSS-240A optical pickup in the Sega CD, then see how much signal you get with various disc types. The original spec for pressed CDs at 1x (I.E. audio CD playback) was 1.4V peak-to-peak, but very few of them are that good now (this is a 20 year old CD player, after all). Generally, the difference in readback signal between first generation CD-Rs and the newest high-speed ones is about 100mV.

 

Just needed a new CD/DVD Burner awhile ago for all my old console burning needs and decided for the LiteOn IHAS124-14 after some reading and comparing. It may sound while burning like a starting jet, but burn quality is excellent! Used Taiyo Yuden, old Sony ones that i got for free and various Verbatim on maximum burning speed. Even the most picky consoles like the Gamecube or Saturn love the burned discs .
The Pioneer Burner i had before also just created crap results which my Saturn or Mega CD could hardly read, if at all.

Ah yeah, the LiteOn Burner is also pretty cheap, paid 13€.

 

Awesome, thats exactly what I wanted. Thanks!

 

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