Dreamcast and Using Burned CD's

[wolfpack]

I have heard rumors that using burned CD's on a dreamcast harms it somehow. Personally I dont know if it does or not. My dads dreamcast is unmodded and I was thinking about playing homebrew on there but I dont know if it would hurt the dreamcast somehow or not because ive also heard about something about the padding in the discs. So ive come to ask on here. Does using burned CD's harm the dreamcast?

[Xiaopang]

I dont know if it would hurt the dreamcast somehow or not...

It definitely wouldn't have hurt reading the stickied FAQ in this forum... using the search button to find one of the tons of threads already dealing with the same old question wouldn't have been very painful either

[Man]

It definitely wouldn't have hurt reading the stickied FAQ in this forum... using the search button to find one of the tons of threads already dealing with the same old question wouldn't have been very painful either

ooohh i bet you feel better about yourslelf, you were a stupid noob at one time, so go easy.

Will a CD-R damage my laser?

There's been a lot of talk about whether a CD-R damages the Dreamcast's laser. The short answer is no. Most homebrew games load directly into the Dreamcast's main RAM, which makes the CD basically stalled in the drive, not spinning or being read. For CD's that require extensive loading you might feel safer adding a dummy file (that pushes the game data to the outer edge of the CD) to the CD. As a result, your games will also load a little faster.

[Xiaopang]

ooohh i bet you feel better about yourslelf, you were a stupid noob at one time, so go easy.

yeah I was, but I still used google and forum searches first instead of creating useless posts like this one

[JKKDARK]

No, the problem is with commercial games on burned CD's

[wolfpack]

No, the problem is with commercial games on burned CD's

ah okay thanks guys.

[72da9]

Yes it will hurt the gd-rom if the cd made is done wrong so to speak. This will burn out the laser unit alot sooner than normal use. This is why games are padded with a dummy file so the game data goes to a location on the cd that does not involve as much seek time for the laser. Take scummvm for the dreamcast for instance. Using one of DcEvolutions images. There are alot of demo's on this disc, but it does need to seek the data often for the games. This will kill the laser unit faster than one of the BOR games done with the dummy file. The laser does not seek as often. Most of the comercial games where done well, but some of them stink and there is alot of seek time on the lasers just to find data to load a game. I say if you hear that laser unit going crazy back and forth don't use that cd, but if the laser unit hardly moves to find data then your good. In all reality 90% of the time as long as you do a dummy file your good. Use the lastest copy of boot dreams. Especially if you make you own emulation disc.