I have a TON of room in my Entertainment set up with more room to free up once I get my new TV. So I'm thinking about what to fill that space up with. PC Engine popped to mind I get an Everdrive for it, burn some discs (or but those "reissues") and I'm set. What I don't know is with my recent luck of Consoles DYING ON ME what could go wrong with a PC Engine or Engine Duo. I know PCE CD Roms are quite prone to disc rot, I hear mixed things about the CD laser. What else tends to go wrong with these systems?
The gears are a soft nylon. You'll see a lot of disc rot in USED discs because the stores all polished the shit out of them.
Do it! It's the best choice! Go with a Duo(-R), everdrive, and some good CD-Rs. Then play the hell out of it! Beware, they have cheap capacitors that need to be replaced eventually. Less so in the Duo-R/RX models. Gear replacements are out there (or at least they were, perhaps in limited quantities), and it doesn't hurt to have a replacement laser on standby just in case you need it. The biggest issue you will find is that once you have a PCE you won't play your other consoles anymore
I know the Joy of the PCE, I have Winds of thunder on my PS3 that I got on JPSN. It does sound like a daunting system to own, But it's one I've always wanted. Plus I gotta learn to repair things sometime. That would explain why my copy of Salamander on Saturn has a big gash in it.
Duo-R and RX costs a bit more but generally they are better built and won't need recapping. Black Duo will always need recap but they generally work fine. The separate CD-ROM^2 add on for TG-16 and PCE/CoreGrafx will need recap and gear fix, maybe new lube on rail too. The CD interface also needs recap. I don't know much about the rare Super CD-ROM addon that was designed with System 3.0 built I went with w Duo-R. I found one on eBay "mostly working" for under $150. It had only one issue: Super CD games sometimes had glitched graphic. Took me a while to trace the issue to a bad trace between CD interface chip and one of the 64kx4 RAM chip. A 2" AWG-30 wire and 5 minutes it's 100% working. Not bad for a $150 steal. all I am missing is a matching white Duo-R controller. FWIW R and RX are exactly the same outside except for the extra letter 'X'. The only difference is the pack in controller. R came with standard 2 buttons controller and RX came with 6 buttons controller which are NOT WORTH THE EXTRA $100 or so!!
i've had ZERO problems with tg-16 cd region modded with arcade card pro. only downside is i think the first gen cd add-on is 1x instead of 2x disc read speed. my nylon gears are nice and solid with no signs of dying anytime soon (have extras anyway) and i always use Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs so the laser is always happy. i've been neglecting my Turbo for my Mega Drive project though.
Trust me, I know. Saved a white PC engine, region modded it, and couldn't get a cheap enough ifu to pair it with, so i sold it. well less than a year later guess what i own with no white pc engine...... YEA sooooo lol im sticking with the turbo for now, and OMG having a Real Pc engine Super CD setup really show how much of a waste of plastic the Turbo and CD were lol.
I am fairly certain the data transfer rate for all PCE/Turbo CD-ROMs is "1x". However some drives might seek faster or something like that. Loads times generally aren't going to be very long with the exception of Arcade Card games because there just isn't that much RAM to fill with data from the disc. The Arcade CD-ROM games do have around 2 megabytes they can fill. But the majority are just Super CD or regular CD-ROM which can fill RAM very quickly because there is so little of it. 2048Kb of an arcade card game might take around 15 seconds to fill but a Super CD-ROM game would be 2 seconds. Ofcourse that's just going with the subject matter of 2x disc read. There just is no need for such a feature for these games. Faster seek time might reduce load times.
It's pretty much a guarantee on the CD-ROM2 system. I bought one where the gear still fuctioned (it could still turn its neighbor anyway) but disks would still rarely load and would usually take like 5 mins at the shortest. Replaced the gear and disks loaded right away. As to getting a replacement gear, I only know of one place to get them: a guy on Yahoo Auctions. The only other solution is replacing two of the gears with a bigger one which makes the system noisier.
