Howdy, I've had these 3 discs for a long time. Bought off eBay from a guy who was selling PS1 consoles with some games. He said he found these 3 discs along with others inside some of the consoles. I'll try to rip them but the BH2 disc is very badly scratched; seems like someone did it in purpose. I also recall not being able to rip the Diablo disc, although it looks perfect. Any special program I can try for ripping stuff that has errors and unreadable sectors? Disc top: Disc bottom:
OK will try. Discs won't play in my PS2. SotN is recognised as an audio CD and plays the hidden audio track only
Most of my PS1 and PS2 blue discs play fine with this machine. Is it possible that the black discs are only playable on debug/dev consoles?
PlayStation discs have a black bottom. If you aren't able to access the disc with a PC's optical drive, I doubt that any PlayStation/PlayStation 2 would be able to. If you want to make a good dump, use the BIN+CUE format to preserve the content of the whole disc. Whatever you do, do not save in ISO9660 alone!
So there's no chance they are actual beta or at least something from Sony factories or devs? Anyway, SotN and Resident Evil 2 were dumped properly with Alcohol 120% in MDS format. Diablo won't dump, stops at 84%. Tried with CDBurnerXP and Alcohol 120%, same problem, won't go through. Disc is almost perfect with no scratches so I have no idea. It plays fine when accessed in the windows explorer. currently trying with ePSXe but so far not booting. This guy got a dump complete by switching to a different OS for dumping http://psxemulator.proboards.com/thread/721/dumping-error-alcohol-52 will try again
discs appear to be from prodisc technology inc. https://www.burnsmart.com/SPIN-X-Black-CD-R-p/101.htm BH2 is in japanese but is definitely not the final version. it has no cutscenes, and no easy/normal selection. rather, it shows leon, leon r, claire, claire r as selectable modes with a 3 seconds timer. i'd like to make sure this is just a naughty guy who burned a beta ROM for fun, just to be sure it's not an undumped beta. EDIT: see if someone can confirm this is the "common" 30/10/1997 beta? SotN appears to be 100% same as the US retail version. disc title even reads SLUS_00067 but again, would be great if someone could confirm
yes clonecd should work, thats what i used to rip the gameshark2 ps2 blue retail disc which no other software could
If you have issues dumping a disc, CloneCD works as it preserves the copy protection data in a .sub file (so you get a .bin, .cue, .ccd, .sub). I've only ever had to do this once as it's uncommon these days. While not overly needed you can also use DVDisaster if you want to check the disc readability (some copy protections will show up red if you scan the disc sectors).
But the PlayStation has no copy protection like that... well, then this may be news to me if it is true. I remember that a nice thing about clone CD was that you could increase the read retry count. If they are master discs, then probably. Have you tried cleaning the disc anyway? Maybe there is a fine layer of dust covering the disc's surface. With discs that old, it may be even bit rot/fungus. To list the contents of the disc, not the whole disc must be accessed. So a failure on one part of the disc may not affect this functionality.
Some real master discs and other betas don't look more convincing though, see here. I'd see no point in faking some betas and leaving them unmarked, then selling them to me for a very low price in a bundle with other games. and the guy knew there was diablo in it, so it must have been tested at one point? unless it was made for personal playing, but then he would have told me. if he wanted to rip me off he would have asked a higher price. just a theory of course. But yes I do find it strange that there is no sticker or any marking on the discs. Maybe they were on the cases and they've been discarded. If I could find the production date of the discs it could help, obviously if they are post 1997 they are probably just homemade copies. Diablo disc was cleaned and looks great, I see no reason why the others can be ripped and not this one. Anyway, here's the content of the Diablo disc, someone who owns a beta or the final one can check no idea if there are some unreadable files or if it's some kind of protection
The point is for next to nothing he can provide additional incentive to buy his lot. As Twilight suggests, real companies probably wouldn't use bargin basement/cheap media. Also, CD-Rs with blacked out bottoms are not rare. Infact I think at one time you could get an assortment of different colors. However legit pre-production CD-Rs of the era I don't believe ever had black data sides. They would be your typical silver color or cyan I think. As upaluppa pointed out, if you check the discs they almost certainly will all match known versions. As far as copy protection and being able to copy it, you can't. The normal copy protection that the CD system uses to determine if your disc is authentic or not is not in the normal disc data area. It exists in the lead-in of the disc I believe. There is some older information out there about purposely bad ECC/EDC or bad sectors but that is incorrect. You cannot burn a disc the PS will accept as authentic. And after all these years if it were possible don't you imagine someone would have done it? There is another copy protection only used in PAL releases that I think utilizes the sub-channel. I think it was called LibCrypt but since I don't live in a PAL area I don't know much about it. Anyway, you were sold CD-Rs this guy or some other random guy burned. Go ahead and check them against retail versions and any publicly available betas if you want to verify.
