this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Burning cds!
I was trying to burn a copy of a game from my friend. It failed over and over. Eventually it succeeded and I was able to play return to castle wolfeinstein.
Not sure if it failed due to copy protection or whatever, but I played that game a bunch back in the day. In more recent years I just bought it for like $1
There were lots of variables to ensure a good cd was burned correctly. Quality of the burner, the quality of cds (from having used hundreds of them, they really had varying qualities) and a big one was the speed of the burn. Lot's of cds did not work for me when the burning speed was too high, for a good one to happen it had to be done in low speed. Also software to burn them sometimes fucked things up, I remember a time when Nero was destroying a bunch of my cds.
And then the copy protections of some influenced many copies, some made it very difficult. But at least we had cracks and all the warez around. Good times.
I remember my brother and I having to set it to 1x speed and leave the room and pray the software didn't hang. No one was allowed to use the computer for anything while it was burning a disc. Lol. So much anticipation!
Early burners if you touched the desk even slightly that little bump would cause the burn to fail. Also you had to stop every other program from running. Screen saver kicked in .. enjoy your new coaster... You just had a buffer underrun while trying to render some flying toasters.
Plextor CDRWs with Verbatim 50yr gold disks ftw.
Burning disks was failing because of the PC's inability to keep the bufferr full all the time in the rate that the disk was spinning. You were selecting write speed. Let's say 24x. If you started doing something else on the PC and it prioritized that, it could reach to a point that it didn't have available in the buffer memory the next set of data to be written. The disk writer couldn't dynamically reduce the speed of spinning. So it ended up having nothing to write at said position. Then it could not resume. It all should happen in one go.