Would the Sega CD benefit from a modern disc drive?

[Frozone212]

The CD drive at the time was slow, partially because it wasn't fast enough but also because it was Motorized and prone to breaking. With modern disc drives (not USB) would the Sega CD be better or worse if it were to be added?

 

Load times on the Base system are long because the disc access is beyond slow. I assume Sega wanted to cut corners.

 

anyway, thoughts?

[Chilly Willy]

You can't use a modern CD in a SCD without replacing the BIOS. The CD in the SCD is actually a standard audio CD, and the SCD hardware includes a chipset that turns the raw audio stream back into CD data. All the oldest CDROMs worked that way to make use of cheap audio CDs.

 

Edited November 10, 2022 by Chilly Willy
S

[Austin]

"Slow" is subjective. Obviously some games are far worse than others (Willy Beamish is nearly unplayable IMO), but relative to load times in the 360/PS3 and Xbox One/PS4 generation, even some of the slow ones actually feel pretty quick by comparison, heh.

[Frozone212]

On 11/10/2022 at 2:07 PM, Chilly Willy said:

You can't use a modern CD in a SCD without replacing the BIOS. The CD in the SCD is actually a standard audio CD, and the SCD hardware includes a chipset that turns the raw audio stream back into CD data. All the oldest CDROMs worked that way to make use of cheap audio CDs.

 

A modern drive not a cd. Let's say the BIOS is replaced, would it be better or worse?

[+Black_Tiger]

If Sega was looking to cut corners they wouldn't have added a cpu, over kill soundchip and asic chip.

 

It's all relative. People had no problem with 20 - 30 second load times every time a PSX JRPG loaded a battle years later.

 

The Sega-CD load times were standard for the time.

 

We now have fpga Sega-CD carts that increase load times as much as possible with and without breaking games.

 

No cd drive with a new bios is going to do better than that. The actual games were programmed around the existing hardware.

[Chilly Willy]

On 11/12/2022 at 6:13 PM, Frozone212 said:

A modern drive not a cd. Let's say the BIOS is replaced, would it be better or worse?

Well, you can still get "modern" CD drives, but yes, a truly modern optical disc drive is a BD that also handles DVD and CD (although some have dropped CD support, so be careful). Say you get such a drive with something like an IDE interface and connect that into the SCD with an appropriate BIOS replacement. It'll be no different for many games. For many, you'll be able to load data at a higher speed, making levels load faster; so those will be better, for a set definition of better. It's not like you'll really make any use of a 50X CDROM in a SCD - the rest of the machine can't handle that throughput. I'd be happy using a 2X drive on the SCD. By the way, the SCD chipset DOES have a bit to control 1X vs 2X on the CD speed. All drives were 1X, so that aspect of the SCD was never exploited or part of the BIOS. That might be a better thing to shoot for when working on a SCD drive upgrade... or replacing the drive completely with an SD card.   Optical discs are so last millennium.

[Flojomojo]

I haven't compared modern optical drives to the old mechanism in the Sega CD, but I wouldn't be surprised if things were chunkier and less likely to break in the early 1990s. So even if you could get it working with BIOS changes, new hardware might be worse. It certainly wouldn't be any better, since everything else around the system is timed to the old single-speed spinning drive. 

 

The ODEs (optical drive emulators) are a better option, putting the data on solid state media. The new Sega Genesis Mini 2 has several CD games on it. I don't miss spinning shiny discs at all. They served a purpose when they were the only way to store hundreds of megabytes of data, but nowadays that amount of information is trivial to store and transmit.

 

The Sega CD only moved 150 kilobytes per second!