Game Disk Problems - AKA autitistic screeching about the degradation of physical media

Giving all my malfunction disks one last try before I get rid of them. Are there any businesses I can sell them to As scrap?

Once m MacBook gets repaired/ I get a new computer (preferably windows) I’m gonna look into ps2 emulation and if my MacBook is broken beyond repair and I get a windows I’m gonna look into getting Morrowind, Metal Gear Rising, and MCC on steam
 
Notgoodwithusernames said:
Giving all my malfunction disks one last try before I get rid of them. Are there any businesses I can sell them to As scrap?

Once m MacBook gets repaired/ I get a new computer (preferably windows) I’m gonna look into ps2 emulation and if my MacBook is broken beyond repair and I get a windows I’m gonna look into getting Morrowind, Metal Gear Rising, and MCC on steam
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just sell them to gamestop

you can put that to $5 towards the new cod game AND a game informer subscription
 
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TaimuRadiu said:
any of you all ever have an original PS1

if so you will know these feels
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The PS1 was a total disaster at launch, only my 3rd one worked as it should. They didn't just have disc read error, they could overheat and lock up or reset themselves randomly as well and it would be apparent within the first week of owning one.

SSF2T Old User said:
I used to have an OG XBOX in my early 20's and one of the games i bought for it was Xtreme Beach Volleyball. The disc had no scratches at all. It played the 4 DDR Ultramix games i had perfectly but would not load this game up, even after getting another copy and making sure it was in mint condition. I just convinced myself that my XBOX was just self-aware and refused to let me see some nice 3d titties :(
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One of the strangest thing I've come across is DVD readers(of different kinds, including PC) that either won't play or won't recognize double layer discs. DOAX might have been double layer.
 
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TaimuRadiu said:
Basically for like 5 years the only way to get a decent ODE for Saturn and Dreamcast was from this one sperg who made them in very limited quantities and you had to be on his mailing list and sign up within 5 minutes of it being announced. Then China began to pirate his design and he went into an autistic screeching frenzy about it. Now he's working on an FM Towns Marty ODE and says you can only get one if you give him the serial number of your unit. This matters for FM Towns because, even if it may have been the first desktop computer with CD-ROM built in for the consumer market (in 1989!), the drives were also really, really badly manufactured.
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The only other game in town was this Ukrainian dude who made a, IMHO, superior product. The GDROM USB. I have one of those and my package was beat to shit. Still have it since I've never had a package ship from overseas be that bad. My unit was unscathed. But then it came out that he might have put a time bomb into one of the earlier firmware that forced people to update lest their unit bricks. Not sure what exactly happened there tbh. Also, the product was essentially a hack job since it wasn't properly emulating the GDROM drive, but using software to boot games. So there was issues here and there. I think D2 being the most notible. Also, he's a bit petty since his comparison chart to the GDEMU on his site made jabs towards them.

And then he claims that he's running out of a part and will only make a few more units. Someone on Assemblers forums (rip) showed off the part and linked to a site where they were still being made en mass. So idk. TerraOnion's products are good but I've heard from /vr/ that they have a lot of bugs in them at launch. So early adopters are bascially beta testing. madlittlepixels did a video on the MODE for his saturn and it had issues. Turns out he had a rare revision that TO didn't have. They were very helpful with their Customer Support and did fix the issue for him with a firmware update.

And then there's PSIO. The guy who makes it apparently has been working on it for a decade and only within the last few years started to release it to the public. He's also very anal about firmware updates and forces people to submit their serial number for it. I think TerraOnion is doing the same for the MODE if madlittlepixels' is to be believed.

All this ODE shit is the wild west.
 
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I don't know whether it was stupid or not, but it was something I picked up from my dad and it worked, so I did it too for a good while. Back during the PS1 days, if a disc wasn't working, he'd bring out the isopropyl alcohol, give the disc a good rub and that would usually do the trick. I did that many a time to get Mega Man Legends working when it got a significant scratch right down the middle.
 
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Smaug's Smokey Hole said:
One of the strangest thing I've come across is DVD readers(of different kinds, including PC) that either won't play or won't recognize double layer discs. DOAX might have been double layer.
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The Wii had a similar issue when some games had double layer and couldn't play. Smash Bros Brawl was one such example.

Is it me or are those blue PS2 discs more fragile?
 
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NerdShamer said:
But if the servers goes down and you don't have an physical copy, you're also screwed.
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I avoid anything that's ALWAYS ONLINE because of this.

Peer to peer servers are not some easy miricle fix once the official server goes down, you need some pretty serious knowledge in specific types of server set ups and not only that you need to go through the game's code to ensure that it plays nice with whatever server functions you're trying to spoof.

Battleborne is shutting down soon, and you're having people going around begging for anyone to try and help archive stuff but it's proving nigh impossible since Gearbox may have scrapped everything relating to the game already. Currently the only online only games that have some serious archives are MMOs but only a few like EQ, Wow, City of Heroes and Asheron's Call.
 
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Drakonnan said:
Why would you archive it to one server? I spread it around to multiple sites also extra harddrives.
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If you play always online games, you don't have access to the server, only the company who runs the game does.

None of the data from always online games can be archived due to this. Which is why people had to go back to pre-modern battle.net WoW discs for the first WoW archives due to 80% of the game data being on the discs.

It's why EQ project 1999 says you can only use specific versions of the discs and if you don't have them you have to download the archive. Online games used to come with all or most of the data on the discs.

City of heroes is the most prominent example of a game noping out nowhere and everyone is left up shit's creek without a paddle. They only got the source code like a year or so ago, after like a decade of it missing and could finally reconstruct the game in some form. You can't back up online games because companies don't want you to, the only way to get the data is from current or former employees.
 
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Marissa Moira said:
If you play always online games, you don't have access to the server, only the company who runs the game does.

None of the data from always online games can be archived due to this. Which is why people had to go back to pre-modern battle.net WoW discs for the first WoW archives due to 80% of the game data being on the discs.

It's why EQ project 1999 says you can only use specific versions of the discs and if you don't have them you have to download the archive. Online games used to come with all or most of the data on the discs.

City of heroes is the most prominent example of a game noping out nowhere and everyone is left up shit's creek without a paddle. They only got the source code like a year or so ago, after like a decade of it missing and could finally reconstruct the game in some form. You can't back up online games because companies don't want you to, the only way to get the data is from current or former employees.
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I am not talking about online games. I am talking about normal single player games.
 
Drakonnan said:
When you don't digitally archive your physical games you set yourself up for failure.
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At that point I rely on ROM files because there's little, if anything I own that hasn't already been well archived by others to a higher standard. eg. I doubt I'm going to need a backup of my specific copy of Mario All Stars or Primal Rage.

For analogue media, that's a different story. I want to make a thread on that soon.

tehpope said:
All this ODE shit is the wild west.
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It's baffling. I'd assume the process would go like this.
  1. Make ODE that is accurate and reliable.
  2. Sell ODE to people that want one.
  3. (Optional) Be happy people are buying your gadget and that it's allowing classic games to live on as intended. Those that don't like it can rage in their own little corner of the internet.
I don't see how you possibly get from that, to all the petty squabbling and e-drama you guys describe. I just want to play old games on original hardware without going broke.
 
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