w00t! Successfully ripped pro skater 2!

[DreamcastKeV]

Thanx to bero for the dreamrip program.. thats phat.

[.:|PogO|:.]

if you really did this, how is your lens feeling right now?

[DreamcastKeV]

Still works fine. took like 19 hours for the rip. kept dc upside down the whole time cuz vents are on bottom and i figured that it would stay cooler.

[Win2000b]

Is there any chance of ripping Dreamcast games can damage your lens then????

[webber]

sure you can damage your lens a lens work with respect to power which is related to current and voltage so you can actually wear it down, just like you can wear down a cdrw drive but why the hell buy one if you are going to be be picky,
i have built a little closed box (out of plywood and stuff) and a fan (high volume) to suck the heat produced by the dc, through temperature tests in a 24 hour period the temperature variation is almost 10 deg cel. this is a significant drop and should prolong the life of my dreamcast but i still have a full warranty for another year on it so just before it goes off i will break it and return it (the deal is no questions asked at the mom and pop shop i got it from)

regards
webber

[Bugman]

It's really not a laser problem. More like overheating. The laser unit in the DC is rated in 1000's of hours. Give or take a few. If everything is well ventilated I would think that more damage is done switching the laser off and on.

[webber]

it has nothing to do with heat the more you use a laser or with every use it deteriorates, heat is taken care of by components in the dc which are responsible for thermal dissipation (the fan in the dc is designed to whisk this heat away from the unit), there is nothing the engineers can do about the laser it is a diode device that wears with time i built one in my fourth year in university as part of a communications device for my fourth year engineering project. If a laser is used significantly (number of hours is great) the device wears out and the power decreases therefore it will not be able to read data as well because of the conversion to digital strings of 1's and 0's , that's why you sometimes get hangups it is because there is an error generated from the pits and lands of the disc surface being read by the laser.
anyways

regards
webber

[DreamcastKeV]

but theres a difference between a college project and something sega tested and made to last during long hours of playing. and no, the little fan on the dreamcast doesnt do shit (only like a 40mm fan) but i strapped an 80MM fan running off my comps power to the vent in the back. now the air coming out of the dreamcast is really cold and the whole drive assembly is at/below room temp when im done ripping so im really not too concerned.

[webber]

my design and project was done in conjunction with the engineering department at the university of southern florida which was then patented and is being implemented in communication services for NASA so don't tell me that my design is different compared to that of sega, if anything it is better
just like the playstation was supposed to play music cds until they found out that it put unnecessary stress on the laser unit and caused it to be a major fault in the system and 75% of all of the repairs that sony made under warranty

regards
webber

[DreamcastKeV]

what do you mean "was supposed to play music cds?" it does. makes a cool little light show too.

[webber]

maybe i phrased it wrong it does play music cds but what sony did when they shipped the system is they skimped on a quality laser and this laser was no intended to be used with music cds (it overworked the laser) leading to premature failure, right? a laser reading a music cd and a game cd works differently because some of the game is loaded in the temp. memory of the unit so it reads and stores intermittently whereas for music it is constantly reading ,
anyways the laser/sled assembly was not as good a quality as should have been put in (cost reduction) so it wore it out, i am sure if you look hard enough on the web (if the subject interest you) you will find articles regarding this
i am not disagreeing with you and i hope that i didn't come off as a smart ass in my previous post, but i as well use my old playstation for music now (well now that i have a ps2)

regards
webber