Trouble Burning Sega Saturn Games

What would you recommend for DC burning in place of ImgBurn? I used DiscJuggler for years, but I honestly didn't think it was still in use.

 

I'm not sure what to say about this peeing match that's going on. Imma gonna need to see more proof about IMGBurn's failings.
All I understand is get a good burner like a Plextor or Samsung or ASUS or something and get quality CD-Rs (not of that offbrand crap), and you should be fine. I've used Maxells before JVC Taiyo Yuden and still haven't had problems despite going through two rolls.

 

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Well it used to be that DJ was the only DC option, and the only software that would burn the CDI format, and as I said previously, I did figure out a way to burn using Toast, I think it involved converting the .cdi files into a 2 part image, something like a bin/cue. When I got a new DC last year after a period of not owning one the general opinion on the scene was that a slightly modified version of ImgBurn was the way to go, I think it was atreyu187 who got it working, but I apologise if it was someone else.

 

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It's a 2 session burn, I think in Toast I had to spilt the .cdi and burn each session separately, manually closing the disc after the second session.

 

It would be nice to have stickies for some of these pretty common questions, especially if they're kept updated. That has usually been my problem when searching this kind of stuff is I just find posts from 6+ years ago with conflicting information. Or even worse when I've had the opposite experience previously. Like in this case I used to always have problems with Nero but when I switched to using IMGburn that stopped. It didn't help that everyone I've ever talked to about burning 360 games has always been "IMGburn ###1!!!!" so I didn't really think that IMGburn could be my problem here. But yeah I should have thought to try other software first lol

Everything I've burned so far has worked although I'm still considering re-calibrating my Saturn along with my Dreamcasts at some point.

That would be cool, you could even share your findings with Lightning and potentially he could fix whatever is going on with IMGburn.

 

I've got some questions about all of this. Assume for a moment that a disc has some data holes in it, and it should not produce a good image. ImgBurn seems to ignore these read issues for me and a couple of other people i know. I'd like to know what the proper rip procedure should be in today's day and age. Also, if we assume for a moment that ImgBurn is terrible, and so is CloneCD (which i've never heard anyone say before), what is the recommended program on a windows 7 box?

 

I've used ImgBurn to rip a couple of my Saturn-games which had tiny holes in them. I did this only to check if there were any read-errors or not, but in no case were there any. The games themselves work just fine on my system.
I too was very worried about the "disc rot" panic I've been reading about these past years. But these holes should only appear when the discs are scratched enough that the reflective layer is exposed to air and moist so that it oxidizes over time.
But since I'm not retarded and I know not to grind the discs across my teeth every time I handle them (yes I'm looking at you, every western seller on ebay...) most of my games are absolutely mint and scratch-free. And still some of them has these tiny holes. I suspect these have occurred during the manufacturing process of the discs, because unless the disc is scratched deep enough this layer cannot oxidize, at least not as far as I've read. This also makes sense as CDs are speculated to last several hundred years.

Until one of my mint games stops working, I'm not worrying about it

The surface of my Donpachi disc for Saturn is a little weird though, as it has a "bubble" of sorts in it. And as a result there are massive holes in that disc, easily 10-20 times bigger than the very tine holes I've mentioned before. This is clearly a manufacturing fault, and I think there's a good chance that this game will stop working eventually. For now, I'm lucky enough that the game only takes up a very small amount of disc space, so the holes are not even close to the data. I need to get myself another copy just in case This disc is absolutely mint too btw

 

Okay, but from what i've seen and experienced myself, imgburn doesn't provide an accurate rip of the game if data holes exist because it doesn't give any indication that the data in the area with holes couldn't be read. Those holes should cause a read error in any good image creation program, and the fact that they don't is very concerning. What i want to find is a program that i can throw a known bad copy of a game in to and have it tell me that it can't read a section of the disc, not just gloss over it or "guess" at the data.

 

I see your point. Yes that's very unfortunate. So you basically have to grab the checksum from the ripped game, and compare it to a known working games checksum :/

 

Still looking for a follow up to this.
I'm inclined to believe that the best rips came from Redump, and their method should be the "standard", but i can't get any confirmation that it is still the case.