Another blog about CDs

This has always been the problem with DRM of any sort. It doesn't affect the pirates as they will find a way around it, It's the legitimate users that are impacted. Companies will cry "won't somebody please think of the profits" But all they have ended up doing is creating a consumer hostile ecosystem.
A lot of people say that this is a modern thing, but this has gone on since the dawn of games. Look at DRM like Lensloc on the spectrum - there were so many avenues for failure with that - Wrong sized TV, your shit out of luck manufacturer added the wrong prism, shit out of luck, prism got scratched in the wrong way or lost - yup shit out of luck - once they have your money they just don't care about what you have to endure to get a working product

Actually wanted to reply to a profile post you made the other day about mastering CD/DVD's at home - There was infact a company who put out a machine where you could do the very thing about 10 years back. Next time I go in the office I'll grab the copy of the brochure I have, but if memory serves it was like a £20k machine and about the size of a washing machine and on paper, it looked fantastic ... until you looked at the cost per disc which was about £4.50 ish not including the cost of the master. Long story short just couldn't afford the outlay even tho we were often working at volume

For as long as I can remember I have hated optical discs! Even the cute and tiny GameCube discs...are still optical media! They are so vulnerable to damage, scratches, fingerprints...and now more recently this bit rot crap!!

It's indeed insane that a legit disc no longer works because of it! But I am glad you managed to make a backup off it in the end. This shows that the claims made by people 'making backups of their game discs' was no BS after all!

that reminds me, i should go backup my data

Ha.CopyProtection. NoCd patches..
When pirated copys work better than the original.
Reminds me of that time RockstarGames simply utilized a cracked Max Payne used it as 'official'. Hilarious.

Still the cake has to be awarded to 'Starforce':
(no... not RyuuseinoRockman, that is the other, better Starforce...)
One of the worst copy protections evar.

On CDs:
Well.. all I burnt ~9 years ago have become unreadable.
CDs suck.
Let's see how my Data BD-R's fare a few years down the line...

PS: PressedCDs ftw. They last the longest.
Forgot your 'burned at home stuff. (unless it's and M-Disk.. haven't checked those out yet.)

pressed CDs don't last longer than burned CDs, i have a windows xp install cd that was lost to disc rot quite some time ago. and there's plenty of examples of video cds being rot to the point the video contained on them is unwatchable

Wow, VideoCD !! Now that's something you don't hear every day! Hahha. I have a couple of movies on VCD and other CD-I games...all in storage though. No idea what their condition is like these days.

I am just wondering: Would mini-discs suffer the same problems with bitrot?? I have a bunch of them and I know most are 'burned' arround 2002-2006 or something. I found the player a few days ago....might just try the discs before moving them all into storage too. Like the CD-I's

I really wonder if the casing and closed 'door thingy' help protect the disc inside. I liked them a lot more than regular CD's

I'm a huge fan of ODDE (Optical Disc Drive Emulation) software and hardware (Especially hardware, like iODD) over actual discs. Though I cannot STAND having DaemonTools installed on my system. It keeps a hostile stance on ISO image takeover, and I'm just not having it. Thankfully Windows 8 and onward have built-in ISO mounting. (A feature that honestly should have been built into Windows XP, but let's not open that can of worms...) I like my ISOs to default open with 7-zip for easy viewing of the files inside, without having any excess mount/dismount going on. I juggle unprotected ISO images all day, erry day... and it's far easier to organize and store a collection of ISOs than a stack of physical discs. Optical drives have long-vanished from PC builds, and I'm honestly not as sad about it as I initially used to be about 10 years ago. That said, I'm still going to be purchasing an external USB 3.0 4K BD burner soon. One disc technology I always loved (And still do love) is LightScribe. I'm now hoarding my LightScribe media because it's disappearing at an alarming rate. DiscT@2 (Disc Tattoo) was another cool thing that I loved, being able to burn a picture and text onto the DATA side of a CD in the extra unburned areas using a LabelFlash supported drive. Truly revolutionary. I always burned XP Installation discs with Service Packs I slipstreamed onto them myself, and had the XP serial key burned on the outer edge of the disc. It looked so dope! I still have a new old-stock LabelFlash drive. (I should probably make a clock at some point.)

Having to completely rebuild a PS2 game using DVD Decrypter and Nero Burning ROM in the early 2000's really wasn't a walk in the park either. I had (still have) a PS2 Slim and MagicDisc v3.6 for my PS2, and used it to boot my "rebuilt and burned" PS2 games. It was less than ideal, and the FREEMCBOOT shit wasn't around back then. It was either this boot disc method, or a modchip.

Wow, I got REALLY off-topic there... But I really do not like optical-based copy protections. Thankfully, I haven't really run into many myself. Though I do own a copy of the first edition Need For Speed: Most Wanted for PC, and the installer on the disc actually has a wrong setting in a config file that makes it impossible to install without modifying the config file, and then burning it to a fresh DVD-R for installation. Really chapped my ass that I can't even install the game from the disc itself without a bunch of bullshit first. Not really a copy protection issue, but still a very troublesome disc. Another game I bought that pissed me off was Unreal Tournament 2004 on PC. The game is supposed to come on a single DVD, so I went to my local Fred Meyer and bought a copy, and when I got home I found out it was the 4 CD version. This pissed me off to no end. So there I am, sitting on my PC for HOURS at a time, editing the discs' config files so I can fir all 4 installation discs onto a single self-made Install DVD(-R).

Has anyone else run into these types of issues with their CD or DVD based PC games??

@Uiaad
If you find that brochure, please share it. £4.50 per disc is way too much. One can achieve better prices with a tower of writers, a wheelbarrow full of CD/DVD spindles and a bunch of ink printers.

@Archerite
The issues with scratches: This could be a thing of the past. The magneto-optical MiniDisk is the perfect example. This same housing method existed for DVD-RAM but got dropped early on.
Now… BDs are very scratch resistant. I failed when trying to scratch one with my fingernails. The coating had to be developed because BD will fail when scratched and the data layer is much nearer to the coating. They didn’t want to try the plastic cage thing again.
This brings me to the question: Why? Again: WHY isn’t this hard coating the standard for all discs since it exists? Verbatim produced some DVD blanks with that protective layer if I recall that correctly. The scratch problem is more or less solved – in theory. But the solution was never widely adopted. Maybe to save a half cent per disc.

@Scott_Pilgrim
Don’t talk about it: Do it. Lamenting over data loss when it is too late doesn’t help.

@notrea11y No Starforce in my collection yet. I avoided them back then because it is really invasive. Time to get some cheap games with Starforce and TAGES!
Today I use No-CD cracks for all of my old games. Doesn’t matter if they contain any malware (which I doubt at this point) as the machine is 100% offline.

@Jayro What is needed to replace files in a PS2 ISO (DVD game)? I know it goes off-topic… I might as well make a new blog entry about this problem. I have a (bad) game with a lot of wave files for the voice acting. Those aren’t normalized and so weak that it is hard to understand. The game allows separate volume settings for sound effects and music – and the voice acting counts as music (Huh??). The real music files are way louder and drown the voices out.
This is an obvious, non-DRM problem on a legit DVD. I have not seen a PC game that would not install because of wrong config. They can’t expect average Jane/Joe to fix such problems. They should have gotten all the discs back as defective! How can this even happen? Didn’t anyone test the image before it went into production?

I have added it to the stuff I need to pick up next time I'm there.
Speaking of bit rot and how bad CD/DVD's can get I actually have a couple of really bad examples that I uncovered a couple of weeks back. Bearing in mind that they have been sat on a spindle alongside other CD/DVD's for years completely undisturbed and are nowhere near as bad. Not even my discs, I believe I got them from a friend in 2001 who was having a clear-out and gave them to me to see if there was anything useful on them ... I believe the only reason he bought them in the first place was that they had the Commodore logo on them so don't buy novelty discs would be the takeaway haha