There were also two different potentiometers for the laser: one for CDs and one for DVDs, and one of them would usually fail before the other.
In my experience the DVD side of things would fail first. I've only encountered a handful of PS2s that had the CD side fail first with the DVD side intact. I would wager a guess that one of three things was happening: A)The CD diode was more mature and/or of a higher quality. B)The DVD diode was cheap and immature by comparison to a technology that had been around a lot longer. C)People used PS2 games on DVDs far more than they did PS1 games or CD based PS2 games. Purely anecdotal but I'm sure others can corroborate my story.
I have a game shark for PS1 and PS2 both are blue bottom. US version. If anyone wants pics and i can take some and post them.
I had a Japanese PS2 that could only read CDs and not DVDs. And then I took apart the drive and it stopped working altogether. Anyway, I'm going to take a look at my PSX games, but I've owned many of them over the years and don't remember ever seeing any color other than black. I suspect, as others have suggested, that blue discs were more common in PAL-land.
I remember the whole bullshit sony came up with for the use of coloured bottomed discs. Seems they had a bull shit story for each console they released. Remember the "PS2 can launch nukes it's so powerful" bullshit they came up with or the "PS2 can do Toy Story in real-time". Even a PS3 can't do Toy Story in real time. I remember for a few years Samsung made coloured bottomed discs including black. So it was possible to make a realistic fake PlayStation game. I'm pretty sure I still have a few around in the loft. Yakumo
Sort of... For CDR's the dye used does affect how well it reads. This isnt technically anything to do with the colour, but its certainly a way to tell them apart. Just like my comment about the Dark Blue verbs reading best - technically nothing to do with the colour, but the statement is still true. It was the way to tell the good dye from the not so good for that brand.
That's more to do with the chemical base of the CDR which determines the colour. In general a dark blue based CDR is of higher quality than a green one or a very pail yellow/green disc.
Yes. DVDR's and all writeable media have different quality's depending on the dye and manufacturing process. This is why some consoles with read some brands or DVDR/CDR and not others. Also, the firmware of your writer will have different strategies for writing to that dye/media ID code. Which again can affect quality of the burn and therefore how well it reads. its not as simple as everyone makes it out to be, if you research it. This is why I ended up with 4 different writers to cover all the different media I use at the best quality. I suggest checking out this forum: http://club.myce.com/f61/
The reason the discs were dye tinted (the dye was added to the plastic, not sandwiched right before the reflexive layer, like is done on CDRs) was just to differentiate them from normal discs. Both the blue (the blue dye is very faint so it does not disturb the infra red laser of the PS1 and PS2) and black (not really black, but actually dark RED) discs dye are invisible to the laser but not invisible for the human eye. The color of the dye do not matter at all, what matters is the information encoded on the pits of the disc. If SONY made PS1 discs with blue dye, it was probably very late on the PS1 life cycle, at least at 1999. That PAL TEKKEN disc look VERY BLACK to me. Sorry.
What 4 if you don't mind my asking? I need to replace my DVD burner with something that doesn't produce garbage.
