Dreamcast-Talk.com

Hey everyone, I'm new here, recently picked up my first Dreamcast, gave it a good cleaning, and long story short, had to order a replacement GDROM drive as the one that came with my console had a broken lid switch (wish i could still give negative feedback to that ebay seller lol).

Anyway, now I have a perfectly working console with a copy of SC and am really happy with it, although I would really like to begin playing burned backups on it if I can. I have a rioddas brand (some generic brand ig) external CD drive/burner, and a pack of Verbatim Datalifeplus CD-Rs on the way.

The reason i call this a "megathread" of sorts I just want a single place to get all my backup games questions answered as I really do not want to damage my console and shorten it's lifespan by playing unoptimized/badly burned discs. So i want to know,

- What speed to burn images to the discs? I'm using ImgBurn with the necessary plugins, and every tutorial i've seen strongly suggests the slowest burn speed possible, which makes sense to me. However I've seen videos about burning PSX games that state that max speed is the least likely to have skipping/corrupted discs (with video evidence). Now ofc PS1 is a different console entirely, so I guess they are just different systems enough that the different write speeds are necessary?

- What's the best method to write "optimized" discs so that the GDROM motor will not have to jump around constantly to read the disc and be under as little stress as possible? I've heard many stories about consoles being sent to early graves because of this. I've seen tutorials saying to make sure your backups are "optimized" but they never elaborate.

- Anything else I should know generally to keep the console as safe as possible playing backups?

well the reason for slow burns is that this way the dreamcast laser will have less strain and last longer.

i personally use jiscjuggler anyway with these settings : slowest speed, mode 2, 3rd party gap and raw write enabled and it's working flawlessy.

as for the optimized games, well you can't do nothing about that apart that finding a good iso, just be sure the laser isn't grinding all over and you should be good to go, pratically the burned game should be silent like an original one...