# Can you burn the wobble groove with a custom cd drive firmware?



## Jokey_Carrot (Jun 6, 2020)

In this video  Mvg mentions that certain cd drives can be moddified to burn ps1 discs that can be played on un modded consoles. Does anyone know if this is true?


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## FAST6191 (Jun 6, 2020)

Don't know about the practical realities (and some earlier PS1 models had little in the way of protection beyond that) but it is within the scope of things -- there are some things drives struggle to replicate about pressed discs but the lead in stuff is usually a lockout (the laser still has to get there to read it after all). I am sure some random maker somewhere over the years made a burner that can have its firmware twiddled to do something nice here. We have had several hacked firmware drives to do various things over the years (360 XGD3 burning being among the more notable, Wii disc reading, some types of drive replacement, the 360 DVD reader stuff itself, some of the disc protections for the PC fell to various modded drives).

How easy it will be to find such a model today, and if it is a vintage burner then how reliable it might be today, would be a different matter.

That said do you really care? PS1 mod chips are easy enough to get hold of, emulation is pretty solid and easy nowadays, and even if you are going to go hardware the extra difficulty in reading burned CDs for the PS1 makes it a tricky proposition for those (if the last models rolled of the line in 2006 ( https://www.gamespot.com/articles/sony-stops-making-original-ps/1100-6146549/ ) and presumably went right to whatever third world country was still big on the PS1 then even those are ancient at this point, if you had one going back to 1994, or possibly even 1993 if they were tooling up that far ahead of time, then yeah...).


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## Myria (Jun 8, 2020)

On an ordinary CD, the groove does not "wobble".  On a CD-R, the groove "wobbles" throughout the disk at a frequency corresponding to 22 050 Hz at 1x CLV speed.  This groove is placed on blank disks by the CD-R factory.  A CD-R writing laser uses the premade wobbling groove to know the proper timing to use for burning.

On a PS1 disk, the groove mostly does not wobble, except for part of "lead-in".  Here, the wobble isn't continuous like a CD-R; rather, it spells out the letters "SCEI", "SCEA", "SCEE" or (rarely) "SCEW".

You can't modify the wobbling on a CD-R because the wobbling is there even on a "blank" disk.  You're much better off trying to use CD pressing facilities to do this...which is very expensive, of course.


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