Why won?t my resurfaced Dreamcast game work?

[kamaya]

Hi

I have a copy of Virtua Tennis 2 that got badly scratched in this incident. There is an indie game shop near me that resurfaces discs on a proper industrial machine for ?2.99 so I took the disc down to give it a go.

One of the scratches is really deep so I wasn't expecting it to come out but all of the others did and apart from the deep scratch the disc looks brand new. I was told that the disc was run through the machine a couple of times due to the depth of the other scratches.

Before getting it resurfaced the game actually worked but I don't know for how long this would be the case as I only played a quick match. Now the disc isn't even recognised by the Dreamcast

The drives spins up and there is a high pitched whistling sound. The laser can be heard to move and attempting to read the disc which it can't so it sounds like the drive is being accessed a lot. Eventually the drive powers down a little bit and then spins up again, it gets stuck in a loop doing this.

Any ideas why this is happening?

I'm not too annoyed because I had written the game off and sourced another copy from here to replace it and I can get the ?2.99 back for the repair. I'm just puzzled why the game would work badly scratched but not now it has been resurfaced.

Cheers,

Kamaya

[gtskater]

I'm sure there is a technical reason for what happened, but I don't enough about optical technology to even hazard a guess.

But...without knowing anything about this machine, it could be designed for CD's and maybe DVD's. In which case, there may be ill effects on GD-ROMs because of the way the data is written to the disc in a tighter format. Only an idea, but could be a possibility.

[probeater]

Maybe they took away too much of the coating, I remeber from the green disc repairers you can buy that you mustn't overdo it with them or you'l be left with a coaster.

[kamaya]

Maybe they took away too much of the coating, I remeber from the green disc repairers you can buy that you mustn't overdo it with them or you'l be left with a coaster.

Maybe, I know the guy did put the disc through a couple of times.

without knowing anything about this machine, it could be designed for CD's and maybe DVD's. In which case, there may be ill effects on GD-ROMs because of the way the data is written to the disc in a tighter format. Only an idea, but could be a possibility.

He does CDs and DVDs, wouldn't a DVD have a higher pit density than a Dreamcast game?

Thanks for the replies so far

// Kamaya

[gtskater]

yeah, something like that, but I remember reading about the tech differences between a GD-Rom and DVDs. I don't think it's as much pit density, but rather having the lines written much closer together.

[Papercut]

The GD Rom format doesn't have as much error correction data as CD Rom, or so the story goes. The tracks are written at a higher density too. So any defects are more likely to be fatal.

Having said that, DVDs have a much higher density of data, so you'd expect the effects of scratching (and resurfacing) to be worse for a DVD than a GD Rom.

I think the most likely explanation is that the resurfacing machine took off too much of the disk face, and now the DC laser is have trouble focussing on the metal plate.

The distance between the disk's data layer and the lens is important, and resurfacing the disk will change that distance.

[kamaya]

Well that sucks....

I was hoping that this would be a good way of repairing any damaged discs I have in the future.

Luckily most of my discs are in good condition

// Kamaya

[Papercut]

... just don't put up any more shelves

[kamaya]

... just don't put up any more shelves

I'm worried about the one I put up over my bed

I'm going to put the shelve back up but I think I will use more brackets (100 should do it ) and use longer masonary screws / wall plugs. Last time I buy a kit from B&Q ft:

// Kamaya