Hacking DVD drive read speed

[Retal]

I am using cIOSrev14 and NeoGamma R7 to play Fire Emblem burned to DVD+R. This works fine, except that there is occasionally a freeze in audio (for less than a second) while it takes several seconds to load data from the ROM. I once read that a version of cIOS could not read from ROMs at full speed, but I don't know if this is still a limitation of the current rev14. Is this problem with Fire Emblem also experienced by retail copy owners and should my setup be able to read discs at full speed, or is this problem caused by an inefficiency of the cIOS?

 

[lll]

All softmods are limited to reading from the DVD drive at 3x speed. The same limitation applies to all modchips that sit on the drive cable, but not to soldered or Wii-Clipped chips which can read at the full 6x.

A way of reading at full speed on softmods is unlikely (but not impossible) given that the restriction of speed is enforced in the DVD drive firmware.

 

[nabster92]

Yea basically that ^^^^

It's not really the fault of the cIOS, backups aren't gonna be read at full speed with softmods right now so if you really want to get around that with softmods you would have to use a USB Loader instead which would read at speeds faster than retail discs themselves.

When I played my retail copy of fire emblem I don't recall any audio freezes so it's likely the fault of it being a backup disc.

 

[WiiPower]

Exactly. I have to add that there's no restriction other than by the used hardware itself when you load games from something else than the Wii drive. USB loaders and FlatMii are only limited by usb and HDD speed.

 

[Retal]

So does a retail disc spin at 3x or 6x?

Also: Hi WiiPower and thanks for developing NeoGamma

 

[nubecoder]

retail = 6x
backup = 3x (DVD+/-R)

Until someone can fake the Wii disc type, telling the drive reader's firmware that a DVD+/-R is a retail Wii disc (highly unlikely IMO), this is what we get with Disc loading.

 

[Retal]

If the firmware knows that a disc is a copy then why does it just reduce the speed instead of refusing to read it at all? That would seem like better copy protection.

 

[mousex]

It's not a protection.
The Wii thinks that DVD-R are Video-DVDs and Video-DVDs need no high speed so it only reads them at 3x.
The backup launchers use this video mode because without it they couldn't read DVD-Rs at all.