Newbie Question: Am I Damaging my Dreamcast?

[raygan]

Hello there. I'm a new Dreamcast owner, I just got mine off e-bay this week. I've been playing a lot of this nice MAME disk someone was clever enough to put together, and I'm looking into other things as well, but I have a question. I keep seeing mentions of homebrew and burned games doing damage to the laser or motor or something in the Dreamcast's drive. Since I plan to play gamed off of CD-R's almost exclusively, am I likely to kill my Dreamcast? The things I read said that the strain was caused by the dreamcast looking at the outer edge of the CD first, and therefore having to run the motor more to find data on less-than-full disks. Is the strain any less on full-to-capacity CD-R? Is it just homebrew, or backup games as well that do damage? And if I am hurting my Dreamcast, how long have I got and is there anything I can do to limit the strain I'm putting on the console?

[fackue]

The problem is mainly with back-up copies of the commercial games... most of the emulators you download don't have much to them and are almost all loaded directly to the Dreamcast's RAM. In other words, the CD isn't accessed really at all unless it needs to read from a game or level or whatever.

It's not something to worry about unless you download back-ups.