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Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

> While SHiFT insists that the method of smudging your disc will give you enough time in a lag to beat the SpongeBob game, he adds a clear caveat that it's not worth the risk of permanently damaging your game or original Xbox console

How would reading a scratched/dirty disc permanently damage a console? That seems like a very bad issue for a device expected to read frequently swapped discs.

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There's a belief in certain corners of the gaming community (and maybe other communities that deal with optical discs) that if the disc drive's laser has to "try hard" to read a disc it will eventually "burn out". Not sure if this is backed up by any actual data or facts - it sounds plausible to me that a laser might dynamically adjust its power level as needed, and that over time that might be bad for it; but it also sounds a bit like people might be anthropomorphizing the laser or something.

I would be more conserned with the laser motor wearing out. That is what killed my Dreamcast. The laser was fine but the motor to move it just gave up from too much use.

This is why I keep my optical drives' moving parts clean and well-lubricated and freshen them up every few years

What do you use to lubricate them? I've got a few PS2s that are starting to give occasional disc read errors and a little laser maintenance might be overdue

White lithium grease for the rails (but don't get it on anything plastic), silicone grease for the plastic gears, and sewing machine oil for the motors :)

This article is hard to read, it seems to repeat itself constantly and expands on nothing. The main point is that smudging the disc can help with performing certain glitches while the console is trying to run error correction but you could potentially scratch your disc to an unusable state if you are too liberal with the smudging. I'm pretty sure I've seen this same topic on HN before so this article isn't exactly reporting on anything new.

The article seems to suggest that you can damage the console itself, though, not just the disc.

Well - ketchup on your disc may drip on the the laser diode - don't you think it's hard to defend against? maybe they need lens wipers against ketchup on the disc issue.

The disc's spin pretty fast, I could see someone smudging the disc too heavily with a substance that might fling off

On some systems/drives if it detects an error that is big enough it will reset the carriage. You can here it reading and rescrubbing over and over. That can cause the carriage motor to overwork and burn out. Not sure of this system does that or not. But that would be my guess.

Exactly. And in the worst case the disk itself might disintegrate due to rotational forces, transferring some of those forces to random parts of the interior of the disc drive. Physical and higher sustained speeds and increased temperatures due to many read attempts make that more likely (but still very uncommon). This isn't entirely theoretical, I have a dead drive to prove it, although not from speed running.

there are a bunch of videos on youtube explaining it. The belief is the game streams data from the disc. Smudges cause read errors on some laser passes that don't fail to read entirely. The effective throughput goes down. This causes the games overall processing of each iteration to somehow be impacted, leading to the behavior the speedrunners use to save time.

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