Is it bad to leave your game systems unused for a while?

Just recently I pulled out my Playstation and PSone out of the storage (they haven't been used for about a year) and was a bit disappointed to see that they both have trouble reading burned CD's that worked perfectly a year ago.

What is your experience? Is it bad to leave your consoles unused for a while? I don't really see how they can go bad. I mean, game consoles are not exactly like cars which can start to rust and develop other serious problems just by not using them.

 

You sure it's the drives and not the disc that have deteriorated? Tried with a fresh burn? CD/DVDRs are not as durable as many people tend to think.

And yes, certain parts of consoles can rust (tho most of the time that doesn't matter), caps can go bad, there's sometimes batteries in there, etc etc

 

How about cleaning the laser?

 

99% fault of the discs. Burn new ones as slow as you can.

 

dude this completely happened to me. I had one of my ps2's in a dresser drawer for a few years. I take it out, won't read any DVD. It wasn't like that before. Temp is controlled between 60-70 degrees in my bedroom.

Also had a snes in my closet that had the video chip go bad spontaneously.

 

I have a SNES I was using spontaneously have a video chip go bad. I had played it just fine no more than 1 month prior. When I played the next game I noticed the issue (sprite corruption) and discovered it was likely the fault of one of the PPU chips. That's also when I discovered that the SNES is somewhat known to have these sorts of custom chip failures. People tend to think of electronics like game consoles as objects that will last forever unless you damage them physically. But as we have seen this just isn't true.

I agree that the issue here is very likely the burned discs have deteriorated over time. Some writable media people buy is really poor quality and starts to decay pretty quickly. And it can be accelerated by poor conditions. So never diagnose a console as having issues reading discs by using writable discs. Factory discs should be used to determine that.

 

I'm pretty sure pressed discs are easier to read than burned ones, so I wouldn't be surprised if reading burned discs killed the laser as well. I read on the dreamcast, at least, the read area of a burned disc is larger than the gd-rom which the laser was designed to read, so it would cause problems



Well what it boils down to is this; A lot of the early scene releases and releases done by individuals that don't know any better were not properly converted over to MilCD format. The most common error in nearly all releases are files not begin placed in the correct order in backups.

Basically lets say the GD-ROM has the following file order: a,b,c,d,e,f. This file order is optimized so that when the game has finished loading "b" and is in need of the data in file "c" that file should be close to the laser. Now lets say someone converted this game to CD-R but didn't bother to correctly order the files, now the order is: a,f,e,c,d,b. Now when the game needs the data from file "c" after loading "b" the laser will have to move further leading to longer seek times.

In other words if the files are not in the correct order you would expect: Longer loading times, hearing the laser seeking more often, and probably things like laggy loading of menu music and cutscenes.

The second problem with a lot of backups is the lack of a proper dummy file (padding). You see the Dreamcast will always read data faster from the outside of the disc, and slower from the inside of the disc. So if you have a small game (300MB or so) like Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 it is important to make sure that all the game data is at outer edge of the disc. You *could* burn this game like any regular CD and all the game data would be near the inside of the disc. It would work but it would have longer loading times and delayed music if you compared it to the original GD-ROM.

http://www.racketboy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18357

 

Pressed discs probably are "easier to read" than writable discs. They also are more stable since they are a pressed form as opposed to using dyes to store data. But good quality writable media stored properly (no excessive heat, shielded from light, particularly sunlight) will read fine and for a reasonable time span. I'm not sure about your first comment about Dreamcast and any "read area" stuff. But the later part is definitely correct that some rips or self booting Dreamcast releases might have paid no attention to the data layout of the original GD-ROM. I would imagine that dummy files to push data out from the center of the disc would be pretty common. But I'm not so sure about ensuring files are in any particular order LBA wise. The developer might arrange the files as you mentioned so that seeking would be minimized and loading times would be optimal.

When you say things about "killed the laser" though it can be misleading that using a burned disc would suddenly break it. Using the laser (assembly) will eventually cause it to fail even with factory discs. But what you said posted about dummy files and file order plays into that as excessive drive seeking could add wear and tear that wouldn't happen on the original disc. The same thing could be true of read errors from poor writable media quality or condition. The system may have the laser assembly attempting to re-read data a lot and add wear and tear that way.

I do recall hearing with the PS2 there actually is something related to burned disc and modchips that can cause lasers to burn out. But I'm not really familiar with that.

 

Why do people keep on giving out this ancient advice? It doesn't apply to newer burners, in fact, artificially limiting the speed will give you a higher chance of an unreadable coaster.

PS1 CD-ROM assembly is so, so easy to swap out too. Your part codes are KSM-440ACM, KSM-440ADM, KSM-440AEM, or KSM-440BAM, depending on your PS1 model. Take six screws out the bottom of the console, lift the top half off, disconnect the old assembly's power and ribbon cables, then lift it off, put the new one on, connect it, and put the lid back on. Done.

Oh yeah and make sure you buy two at a time, they're only $15 each IIRC, but they are made on the cheap like everything else, so if you get a DOA the first time like I did, you won't have to wait another 3 weeks for a second delivery.

 

How does burning at a slower speed give more of a chance of a disc being unreadable?

 

Burning speed isn't really the issue. It's more about your burner and the media being a good match from what I remember reading. As long as your PC isn't having issues causing a buffer underrun or anything like that.

Before replacing a PS1 CD-ROM assembly it's worth it to see if you can fix it with a little maintenance like cleaning the lens or lubricating the sled. But yes, it's pretty easy to just get another one and swap it in place.

 

It's bad for your health and well being to leave your consoles unused for awhile

 

My experience has been that I've had more dud discs with forced slow burns than just keeping it on maximum, and there was a great write up on some forum somewhere that I read years ago that laid out the facts, but I can't seem to find it now. I wish I could, I'd like to read it again. Anyway, when you see 48x or 52x speed advertised on the burn media and you have a drive that is marked on the front that it can do the same, it stands to reason that there was far more testing of each of these products at these higher/maximum speeds than the slower; they were designed to do this. Also, if you're getting heaps of duds out of your crusty old DVD drive, then what's needed is for you to pull that sucker out and slap in a new one instead of automatically blaming "burn speeds" and "shoddy media". They cost what, fifty bucks? Mechanical shit wears out over time.

Optical media, especially CDs and DVDs, have been out long enough now that the tech is compact and cheap and most, if not all, design problems have been fixed by now. This "slow burn" stuff is leftovers from the time when you apparently couldn't move the cursor during a burn without ruining it and throwing out a $5 blank.

 

I have hundreds of 25 year old burned discs: here, from different manufacturers.

Some became completely unreadable (sometimes isobuster could rescue parts of them)
others are just fine.

All discs had been stored in a dark and dry place over the past 20 years.
No sunlight, no scratches.


There is a good wiki on the lifespan of CD-R's:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-R

 

For some reasons older consoles read better from disc burn at slower speeds; not sure the reason for that i presume the data is burned "deeper" and reads better on very old equipments?

This in my experience of years of burns... and is true only for Cds (avoid those 80 mins ones btw), while dvds you can burn them at any speed.

 

+1 for this

and Moser Baer India discs don't run in many systems at all. Unfortunatly most Disc on the market are from MBI, for example many people think verbatim is better just because of the name, thats wrong because verbatim isn't a manufacturer its just a brand, so it says nothing about the quality (jitter etc.). Its the best to always take a look on the media ID, there are just a couple of disc producers in the world. MBI is easy to identify on the retail package too, it says "Made in India". I had never problems with CMC Magnetics "Made In China". No doubt Taiyon Yuden are the best , but very expensive.


Electronic parts lifetime is listed with power-on time in hours/minutes. So we can say in general that a console last longer the less it gets used. Always unplug from power while we don't use them

 

I didn't use one of my psone screens for a while now it doesn't power up

 

My Panasonic Q somehow managed to destroy its disc tray just by sitting on the shelf unused for years, couldn't even get the tray open to be able to reach the drive belt (which I bet was hardened). Play your stuff, folks!

 

So typical,same here! It's hard to play all your consoles when you have like 20...

 

I could see that because those tray drives have rubber belt things that petrify over time despite if they are turned on or not, but stuff like my snes killing itself remains a mystery to me