Mortal Kombat beta (Mega CD)

I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is I have a Mortal Kombat beta for the Mega CD (Sega CD). The bad news is both of my drives are unable to read a lot of the files that are on the disc in order to make an ISO. The disc is not scratched whatsoever, so it's either bad dye or I need to try something else. It used to work some years back when I obtained it. This saddens me because I haven't seen this anywhere else and I'd love to distribute it for anyone interested. I've attached a picture of it. It's nothing much.

 

really unlucky! might want to try some different drives expecially old ones that read slower... have you tried some of those recovery softwares?

 

Now that I think about it, both of my drives are newer drives. The one I originally tested it on ages ago was obviously older, so I'll try one of my old drives soon and see if that does the trick. Fingers crossed.

 

Obviously that is an interesting item!
Can't wait to see it released!

 

Definitely try a different drive. I've got multiple discs (some of them preview discs etc) that won't rip in either of my internal drives but read fine on an external drive.

 

if all fails there's the dangerous "boiling method" >_>

 

x

 

Files are visible when it's in the drive, but when I try making an image of it, it can't read some of the sectors. It seems to be random as to what sectors it can't read, leading me to believe (and hope) that it's possibly just my newer drives. I have plenty of old ones laying around and will try to test it on those later today or tomorrow. I'll keep you guys posted.

 

Hope it works

 

x

 

I used a CD-R drive from '99 for my rips, works a charm, my DVD-drive from 2006 sucks, go figure.

 

Slower drives often work better on discs with aging dye.

 

Curious what is different in this beta. It'd be a shame if the CD-R data rotted.

 

Old CD drives are godly. At the very least find something incapable of burning DVDs.

That isn't always the best way to do it. I'm not sure of the reasons/science behind how the discs react, but I've seen them spit out ridiculous amounts of errors when just left reading endlessly. Subjecting a dieing disc to reading hell might just finish it...

My best suggestion for discs that spit out seemingly random errors. Rip them at max speed, with error skipping on. Knock out 2 or 3 images, then shuffle the verifiable good bits back together. CDmage makes that easy for the data portion of SegaCD discs. Audio tracks might be more problematic, but try stripping out individual tracks and see if you can get some CRC matches. Problem tracks can be broken down into smaller chunks as needed.

 

It shouldn't really affect the disc, the resulting heat might not be good I guess. It is a fast way to kill any laser unit, though; nothing quite like chewing through bad sectors to finish off a flaky laser.

Optical drives will spit out ridiculous amounts of errors when left reading dead discs endlessly... but that's because dead optical discs tend to have lots of affected sectors. It's not like a HDD where you might be lucky and only get a few.

 

Like others have said, go with an onld CD drive. Both my Panasonic and PioneerDVD-RW drives have trouble with old discs but my Yamaha CD-RW drive from 1999 works like a charm 100% of the time.

Yakumo

 

I concur with the rest. I have a Samsung DVD-ROM that rarely reads anything (I just use it with Kreon firmware for XBox ripping) but a DVD-ROM pulled from a circa 2000 machine works GREAT for reading what it won't.

 

Quality really took a nose-dive..

 

It's the same with everything these days. Even kids toys. I remember the original Transformers being really solid toys made from quality plastics and metal. Now they're super light cheap shit like everything else.

 

As my father says, things now a days , "has built in wear and tear". Which strangely makes sense, or at least it makes sense to me.