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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

The most fragile part of the PlayStation, just like the GameCube and many other consoles, is the optical drive. I don't know what the AFR is for a typical CD-ROM drive, but when you consider that the PlayStation hardware is 20 years old, it's unsurprising that so many of them have failed.

So I think flash card readers for the PlayStation are a much more interesting technology.

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I recall having 'burnt out' two optical drives on hand-me-downed PS1's.

Instead of needing a mod chip, you could jam the internal open/close switch mechanism closed. Allowing you to open the disc tray while it was still spinning. You'd let a legitimate game boot up to pass the DRM, then swap in a burnt disc. I wondered if it contributed to the drives failing.

Also to your point, is Disc Rot itself attacking original discs.

Used to do this trick. Its called the double swap trick.

I did this too but I thought I also had a module that I had to plug into the back to make this work. This was 20 years ago of course so maybe I am remembering this wrong.

You had an older model PSX with the parallel port and a Gameshark Pro or similar device.

All these disc swap techniques work the same. The PSX only authenticated discs on boot or after the cover was closed, the latter being easily defeated with a piece of tape. If you could swap an authentic disc for a burned one after it had been authenticated, but before any of the actual data had been read, the PSX would run it. The cheapest option was to just force the motor to stop spinning by hand and swap discs at the correct time in the boot process. Cheat discs/devices like the Gameshark made this process easier because they would spin the drive down once you reached their menu and were designed to launch another disc when commanded so you didn't have to precisely time the swap.

-The cheapest option was to just force the motor to stop spinning by hand

Ah, yes that's why I recall thinking doing the trick caused the disc drives to fail.

At least in the USA, most drive failures of early models (the ones that the swap trick worked on) were due to poor quality plastic carriages. Flipping the system upside down would help... for a time.

The best way to do this trick was with a Gameshark/Action Replay disc. After the Gameshark booted it would let the drive spin down until you told it to launch the game. You still had to jam the switch since the PSX reauthenticated the disc when you closed the lid, but you didn't have to worry about damaging the drive or swapping discs at just the right time.

The drive failure comes from the burnt discs. Pressed discs (PS1, CDROM, etc) have pits and a reflective layer that reflect almost 100% the light from the laser. Burned discs have a thin layer of ink. They simulate those pits when they are burned. But since the light has to pass through a layer of ink you lose about 30-50% reflectivity. Those early lasers weren’t designed for CD-R. And to compensate for the loss of reflected light the CDROM controller would pump up the light output. And eventually burn out the laser. And one day you’d be unable to read discs. Then you’d hop on eBay to find hundreds of replacement laser modules for sale because it was super common

That's interesting. Any source on this? Because CD-R specs says:

>After recording, the CD-R disc satisfies the specifications as written in the chapter DISC SPECIFICATION of the Red Book.

Why does that matter? That doesn't mean that Sony's non-RedBook drive laser can read CD-R for 20 years

Presumably Sony had no reason to design to full spec compliance.

“ Some hardware compatible with Red Book CDs may have difficulty reading CD-Rs and, because of their lower reflectivity, especially CD-RWs.”[0]

Also it was common knowledge in the modder community that playing with a modchip burned the laser diode. The theory was the CD-Rs reflectivity made it overdrive. It could also be the modchip itself caused the laser to burnout. Most chips were soldered directly to the CDROM controller. And may have been inadvertently overdriving the laser.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-R

I don't have a concrete source for this handy but I don't think this is totally accurate. For one, the plastic rails on earlier PS1 disk drives wear out and can be a source of error. Secondly, you still see failed disk drives on consoles without modchips.

I think burned discs are probably one factor but I think general hardware failure or dirty lenses are a more common cause.

Seriously - even when they were current it was common for PS1s to have dying CD drives. I and many others needed to turn their systems on their side to keep it reading discs properly.

Iirc that was because the spring loaded lens mount was losing its strength and the lens wasn't able to focus properly anymore

Another issue was that the intended purpose for the CD-ROM was to load some data for a videogame level, and maybe stream some music while it was played. But Crash Bandicoot came in the first year of the console's life, and it used non-stop disc access to continuously load data into RAM. A single playthrough of Crash Bandicoot surpassed the drive's expected lifetime.

> Andy had given Kelly a rough idea of how we were getting so much detail through the system: spooling. Kelly asked Andy if he understood correctly that any move forward or backward in a level entailed loading in new data, a CD “hit.” Andy proudly stated that indeed it did. Kelly asked how many of these CD hits Andy thought a gamer that finished Crash would have. Andy did some thinking and off the top of his head said “Roughly 120,000.” Kelly became very silent for a moment and then quietly mumbled “the PlayStation CD drive is ‘rated’ for 70,000.”

https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/video-games/making-crash/

I remember getting a dead PS2 to fix. It wasn't dead though, it was a staff unit at a pizza shop, full of flour, and just needed the lens cleaned with a cotton swab and alcohol.

I wonder what part of the optical drive is failing.

Not my finest moment, but I once did the opposite.

The PS2's optical drive was clearly failing, it would work with some discs but not others. Cleaning the lens didn't help. The Internet told me it was possible to use a screwdriver to turn something in the console to increase power to the laser (iirc). I tried this, but I ended up bricking the PS2. Oops. No big deal, replaced it the next day.

And yes, I'm very much a 'software person'. You know what they say about the one thing worse than an electronic engineer with a C compiler.

I recall that when replacing it, the electronics exchange place I went to would only sell a used PS2 when bundled with a controller, you couldn't buy the console on its own. I did the obvious thing: I sold them a controller for store credit, then bought a PS2 bundled with a controller.

Many consoles already have optical drive emulation mod, e.g. GC Loader for GameCube.

To further what neetrain said, there is also some cool unexpected stuff to come out of it as a result.

The Dreamcast had a ROM-based arcade equivalent, the Atomiswave. A dreamcast-talk forum member, "megavolt85", has started to convert the Atomiswave games over to the Dreamcast optical drive emulators (like the MODE, which is a drive emulator for both the Saturn and Dreamcast).

https://www.retrorgb.com/atomiswave-dreamcast-arcade-ports.h...

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