Sega CD Model 2 - CD-R advice/suggestions

Hello everyone,

First just a quick thank you to everyone for the wealth of information I've found here. It's been invaluable in helping me assemble and maintain my retro collection.

I recently acquired a Sega CD Model 2, BIOS rev. 2.00, in good working condition. It was immediately tested with a few commercially pressed discs and works flawlessly (frankly I was surprised at the load times, I've never had one of these before and expected them to be much worse). The unit is clean and does not appear to have been "serviced" previously. Caps look good, and the laser mechanism just needed a tiny bit of cleaning and lubrication. The laser lens was also cleaned. Re-tested after cleaning and still working like a champ.

However, the unit will not reliably read burned CD-Rs. I've tried a few different types of media with varying levels of failure, and can't produce something that's actually playable. All burns were done from known good image files following recommended best practices. A breakdown of what I've tested, and comparison to my results on a Sega Saturn using the same media/burner/procedures:

"Standard" off-the shelf Verbatim blanks:
Sega CD - Disc will be recognized and boot to Sega logo splash, hangs
Saturn - Disc will spin but is not recognized

Verbatim brand Lightscribe blanks (Moser Baer):
Sega CD - Disc recognized and game might start. I've gotten the farthest with these but still not reliably playable
Saturn - Disc not recognized at all, will not spin up

CMC Pro TY's:
Sega CD - Disc spins but not recognized. System hangs or drops to audio CD interface
Saturn - Near flawless, only two instances where I'm concerned it may not be a Pseudo Saturn issue (random hangs in Albert Odyssey (U) when entering/leaving a room/building, cannot produce a reliable working burn of Castlevania SOTN (J))

This Sega CD unit uses the KSS-210a laser pickup, and I've ordered a new one for replacement. I don't have the knowledge or equipment to do anything useful with the pots short of blind guessing. I guess I'm looking for advice/experiences with this scenario...should I expect the new laser pickup to make a difference? If it doesn't, is pot tinkering my only/best potential solution? Is it possible/worthwhile to change the unit to a different model laser pickup?

Thank you in advance!

 

Can agree to most of this. Older CD units are very finicky, just like my X'Eye. It will only work if I record games using these Sony CDs I have, but then they freeze at least 10 minutes into the game. No dice with Riteks or CMCs. Odd it seems to do that with those CMC Pros for you, those are normally decent.

What I would suggest is buy a new laser but still pot tweak the old one. Using a voltmeter set to Ohms isn't the recommended way to do it, but try that in 5-10 Ohm consistent adjustments down if you don't have an oscilloscope to get just the right waves. Once the new one arrives, you won't have a problem if you kill the old one.

 

I will tell you to go try other actual burners. my toshiba laptop burns all the disks well, my dell xps makes coasters that do exactly what you're describing. also what burn speed? try faster or slower, some burners just don't have write strategies for the disc brand, and default to a built in setting that may or may not work well. my front load model 1 has never had a POT adjustment and plays all discs, even the shitty economoy princos from my job as long as i burn them on my toshiba.

 

I agree you should try a different burner, as well as different media. You should be able to find a combination that works without tweaking the Sega CD. I never had any issues using CD-Rs in my Sega CD model 2. I even used cheap Memorex black bottom CD-Rs before which worked just fine.

From what I remember, some burners do better with certain types/brands of media than others. So you just have to experiment and see what produces good discs.

 

supersega:

Yeah I was really surprised that the CMC Pros have come up the worst so far, especially considering how stellar they are in the Saturn. Those Verbatim Lightscribes that almost work were dug out of a box and have to be around 10 years old! I hadn't really considered that with two working lasers it would be safe to screw with the pot on the old one. Just to confirm, for the KSS-210a the only pot I'm interested in is mounted on the laser pickup itself and controls intensity; the pots on the mainboard control angle and elevation and should not be touched? I've read stuff about all three possible pickups and don't want to get my figurative wires crossed.

skyway and MottZilla:

I feel like I dunce, I hadn't considered a different burner. I've been using an ASUS DRW-24B1ST in my tower, but haven't tried the one in my laptop (an HP super-combo bd-rom/cd-rw/cd-r), I don't think I've ever used it and forgot it was there! That ASUS drive has a minimum burn speed of 16x (which is what I've been using), I actually don't know what the specs on the HP are but that definitely sounds like my next step. I have a box of older burners lying around that I've been too lazy to go through and identify which are dead and which still work, now I have an excuse to do it

I'll definitely be trying the different burner/media combos first. Once I have the new laser, I will first validate that it works properly with commercial discs, and then if I'm still having trouble with CD-Rs I will reinstall the old laser and try pot adjustments on that. I'm really hoping I can get the CMC Pros to work but that's purely a matter of the convenience of being able the use the same blanks for everything, since they work so well in the Saturn.

I don't expect to receive the new laser pickup until next week, but will be able to try the alternate burners in the next few days. Thank you all very much for the advice! I will update later with results.

 

Wow! Those CDs for sure have some age on them. Yeah, that should be the only one you need to mess around with, but make sure to record the stock setting. Not much effort is going to be needed to turn it as well, so take your time and be cautious.

For the burner discussion, I have never noticed a difference. I have at least 5 burners and all of them produce the same bad results. I might just try the one on my HP Craptop, provided it works.

 

If those are blue cyanine Taiyo they ARE the best, it's the burner making them run amuck. those are the ones that all my consoles like best and are usually about up to 80% close to a pressed disc I've tested it using an O scope. Laser used the least energy on these CD-Rs. Gold masters surprisingly don't burn well in this burner, most of my consoles read them but not as well as the Taiyos.

 

Just chiming in to mention different burners as well!
I recently bought a new Pioneer burner to eventually replace my 2011 LG one.
I compared the discs of both burners and even did 2 each, one written at max speed, one with a slow setting.
On the scope it looks as follows (using a PSX):
- old LG produces a very sharp RF signal at max speed (40x) and mediocre / jittery RF signal at low speed (16x)
- new Pioneer produces crap. Lots of jitter and even some read errors. Speeds didn't matter.

So yea, for now I recommend trying LG burners. Mine is from 2011 and was the cheapest they had ;p

Edit:
The CD-R used were all the same light green dye supermarket 50x stack. Might be Cyanine (from CMC).

 

OK wow, so I tried the CMC Pros in my laptop burner (an HP-branded LG CT40N circa 2010) and so far it's 3 for 3 successful. The discs are instantly recognized, boot, and play (only a few minutes test each so far) with zero issues.

rama, I tried this before reading your post which was obviously prophetic wrt LG I will keep your burn speed results in mind if I run into any issues. I'm looking forward to throwing my troublesome Saturn images at it as well.

Thank you very much to everyone for all of the advice and help! I hope I can be as helpful as you all have been!

 

It really becomes clear when you look at things under the scope.
This is the real tip: Try and find an old scope of 50Mhz or better and test your stuff!

 

It's crazy, I had thought that by 2016 CD burners would be so standardized and commoditized that any modern drive would produce the same quality results. Oh well, it's still better than the days where you needed a SCSI Plextor and some voodoo hexes to get reliable burns

rama that sounds like the perfect excuse to educate myself, I will look into it!

 

It's actually the opposite. Now that CD-R technology is old companies cut corners and don't give a shit about quality for it anymore. Most consumers these days only need a burner to be good enough to burn the odd Music compilation CD or something like that. So most companies don't exactly put much into quality like they used to for CD-R tech.

But there are still good burners and CD-R media being produced. You should find it and keep buying it so that hopefully it stays in production as long as possible. I use some kind of JVC/Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs and DVD-Rs for my burns. I think I use Verbatim for DVD+R DL and BD-R. The DVD+R DL did work fine with the X360. Never used a BD-R in any console so I can't say how those would work if that's even an option with anything.

 

I have 3 different pioneer drives that give exceptional burn quality. You cant just call out a brand like this.

 

Three different new drives or older? I am only curious of the age (production date) since the other guy could only muster a vague "new". Not confident enough yet to dive in to the dedicated forums for burners and disc burning.

 

Fine, it's the Pioneer DVR-221 that produces crap with CMC made CD-R.
I can't make it more specific than that.

 

Ok thanks that helps.