exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

OK, so I tried a PAL image burned at x16 speed and it started to boot then hung. The CD drive was mighty noisy at the time too.

I'll give it one more go with a slower burn speed and an early release game, but I'm not hopeful, but that's OK as once the PSIO arrives I won't need it to work.

Try on the lowest burn speed. I know that used to be a problem, so do e.g. 4x

mrbombermillzy wrote: 28 Feb 2026 17:50 Try on the lowest burn speed. I know that used to be a problem, so do e.g. 4x

Definitely worth a try.

Might sound odd, but put the ps1 upside down and see if it loads then - if it does, the laser is shot.

JD

Hellraiseruk wrote: 28 Feb 2026 23:19 Might sound odd, but put the ps1 upside down and see if it loads then - if it does, the laser is shot.

JD

I'll try later, though genuine discs do boot just fine.

OK, so I have tried disks recorded at x1, x4, x8, x16 and max speeds and none work, and flipping the PS1 upside down made no difference. Original discs boot just fine.

Some did start to boot and got as far as the Sony SCEE screen but then fail at that point.

I'm not inclined to waste anymore CDR's so here endeth the experiment.

I had a burner that never produced a single good ps1 disk. In fact it was a well documented model that just couldn't. (Its name escapes me now)

prog99 wrote: 01 Mar 2026 22:45 I had a burner that never produced a single good ps1 disk. In fact it was a well documented model that just couldn't. (Its name escapes me now)

I may try burning one in another machine with an older drive, just to be sure I've covered all bases. I was using an external burner, but I have a machine with a built in drive that worked very well for Dreamcast disks, so it might be fine.

My modded PSOne was VERY picky about CDR brands back in the day. It had expensive tastes and was fine with stuff like Verbatim but would regularly spit a dummy out at integral and no-name branded silvers.

With the consolidation in CDR manufacturing over the years, it wouldn't surprise me if even if the expensive branded stuff is just as cheaply made now. I have a box of Imation CD-RWs up here which a friend's writer refused to write properly, but the same computer and discs worked absolutely fine with my external samsung writer I have when I gave them to her.

Another thing to remember is that blank (and written) CD-R discs have a shelf life.

In the day the best CD-R (800mb) dye was Taiyo Yuden. They were readable on practically any drive (and discs burned in the 90s still work today). I used them for most of the PS1 era but very late on I switched to printable Ritek black (they looked just like original PS1 discs) they looked and played great back then but all are unreadable today.