I personally use Verbatim CD-Rs and I always burn at 2x for Mega CD. You should try to get rips of games that are bin and cue I have never been able to get the ones with MP3s to work correctly.
Go with Verbatim.
I used it on me PS2/Xbox/Wii/GCN and 360.
I also recommend it to everyone cause of it's quality.
Not only that but the Burner Max firmware for burning 360 games only works with Verbatim ones by default.
cool, I did have like a whole pile of verbatim ones but I appear to have lost them. if I can find them i'll try with those. if not, may have to head into town and try the local store. online says they stock verbatim...
just trying to figure out whether the pioneer drive I have around here will burn at 2x?
http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/PUSA/Computer/Computer+Drives/DVR-106+&+DVR-A06U
that says
16X, 12X, 8X, 4X, CLV (2.4MB/s)
for cd-r burning which isn't too encouraging. I have the dvr-106
D but i'm not sure there is much difference? it does burn dvd-r at
4X (*2), 2X (*3), 1X CLV (5.54MB/s)
but thats not much help since mega cd can't read dvds. hmm may have to check the other optical drives I have....
The appropriate response to this is "you have a working megacd?". I would not be surprised to see RWs fail (they are subtly different) and normal CDRs are harder to read than pressed discs so you may be seeing the results of the laser slowly shuffling off this mortal coil (I refer back to the first sentence). I am not sure about a pot tweak for the megacd and how you might set about that, even if I did not know how to do it for this system I am not sure how advisable it is.
If you are not familiar with the concept of a pot tweak then most optical media drives will have a small variable resistor/potentiometer in with the circuit for the laser. Owing to basic electrical equations a lower resistance allows more current to flow and thus you get a brighter laser, or returning your laser to factory settings. Fractions of a kiloOhm, usually no more than an 1/8 of a turn (probably more like a 16th and that is still possibly a bit much) and merely breathing on the thing (or approaching it with a metal screwdriver) is enough to radically alter things.
In every console I have ever seen have this happen for then this tweak is usually considered a "limp home"/"get me through until payday"/"can I try to get some time to save up for a replacement" type fix rather than anything long term, equally if it was not already clear this is not great for the laser's general health either.
Write speed is pretty much a myth these days. Back when the PS1 was doing the rounds then we had no buffer underrun (and small buffers to boot) protection, less than high grade drives and less than great chemicals for the discs (or high prices for good chemicals) it meant a lot. Somewhat ironically the newer drives and chemicals might have to make an effort to burn that slow and can actually come off with worse burns for trying to go really slow. Do not necessarily take this as a suggestion max the speed (the full 50X burn or something) but a safe 16x or 24x should be a better bet.
If it came with audio tracks then it should have also come with a cue file or something along those lines to allow the program to sort all that. I have no idea for the megacd if you can manually force these tracks back in (theoretically it should just say load audio track * but who knows with this sort of stuff a sector level load is not outside the realms of possibility). Some rips I have seen out there for other systems, and apparently this does include the megacd, do compress the audio tracks to MP3 or something and leave you to convert them back to burn with.
Also when you say a long time is this relative to how it should be because a lot of megacd stuff did not have the fastest load times, and even otherwise accurate megacd emulators tend to resist the urge to emulate load times.
On actual media I am afraid it has been a few too many years since I needed quality writable CDs (other than the occasional audio CD and linux liveCD I have not had need to do a CD either).
you know, the thought did cross my mind that the hardware is playing up... I have some original discs around and although it has trouble reading them (due to scuffs and scratches) I always assumed this was why it took so long to read the game discs and boot properly. now i'm wondering if the hardware inside the mega cd is the problem? I have heard though that since they are quite old they have a hard time reading cds and so its best to minimise the work it has to do by making sure its a good burned disc or clean.
in terms of load times, the first burn of the nrg file loaded the sega logo quite quick within about 20 seconds, the konami logo along with some data about the game popped up within a minute. the iso file disc took about twice as long to load it all. the furthest i've got with either is the start menu and it took a couple of minutes to get there. after that, no response, black screen, no sound from the cd drive. it attempts
something, can hear it whir, but stops after a while. I left it in that state for a good 5 minutes to see if anything came up while doing other bits and bobs.
thanks for the info about write speeds and audio.
Good rips of mega cd games are normally in bin/cue format. 8x speed with good quality media like Verbatim should be fine. Convert the rips to the region that matches your mega cd. Try IMGBurn for burning software (providing you have the correct cue sheet) and you should be fine.
ok this is reassuring about the write speed ,might mean I don't have to change drives after all. but that does leave me wondering about the health of the mega cd?... or if those sony discs aren't really that great? anyhow, i'll try and find some verbatim and let you all know.
cheers.
