76

(4 replies, posted in General discussion)

I didn't know about mislabeled licensed discs. My unlicensed discs don't have the logos. Identifying by ringcodes is good, but most members don't know how to do that, which brings up another guide issue that I'll explain below.

It'd be nice if we had a ringcode guide on the site. There are a lot of new and old members that don't know they are supposed to provide the codes with their dumps. Having a guide would eliminate the confusion, since the current guides only cover dumping and they don't even mention ringcodes. There have been some helpful posts by members in the dumps forum recently. Maybe their posts could be the basis for a guide on ringcodes.

I was already using the intelligent bad sector scanner with the SafeDisc profile.

Dumping as audio with the audio trap disc didn't get any farther than dumping as normal.

I agree with iR0b0t. Those rings look like physical gaps in the discs, which is causing the dumping problems. Even the blue disc has a ring, which is probably why they all stop at 6%.

Here's some info about the discs if anyone wanted to know:

CD discs: 318933 sectors, has data from SLUS-20202 (Crazy Taxi)
DVD discs: 2282416 sectors, has data from SLUS-20071 (DOA2: Hardcore)

I gave up on the error skipping methods. They take too long and it usually gives me a different unreadable sector each time I try to copy. I was hoping that there would be an easy method to copy these discs, but I'm not too concerned about them, I was just curious if they could be dumped.

EDIT: I tried your IsoBuster method and it didn't work, the program just locked up with two different drives. I've already tried the CloneCD method, so it looks like these discs are copy-proof. It'd be nice if there were a program to run on the PS2 itself that could dump discs, that might be the only way.

I finally got access to a scanner, so here are the disc scans:

GameShark 2 V1.2 CD
Swap Magic 3.6 CD
Swap Magic 3.6 DVD

@M00NLiGHT

Yes, these drives can dump GD-ROM discs, but I haven't had very good results with my drive. Most of my discs won't dump because of very minor scratches, which makes me think it's not the best for these discs, but it does dump Xbox/360 discs, which is mainly what I wanted.

The SH and TS drives use the same Kreon firmware, but each letter revision of the drives uses a different Kreon firmware. When flashing the TS drives you have to run the command  "sfdnwin.exe -nocheck" and then select the Kreon firmware, you have to do this because the flasher only wants to flash SH drives by default.

pablogm123 is correct that the TS-Hxxxx are OEM drives, mine is a Dell. So you could also search for HP or Dell to find the TS drives. The TS drives are usually cheaper, mine was $13 new. Just make sure you don't get the C version of the SH-D163/TS-H353, it's not Kreon compatible.

I mentioned some Kreon compatible drives in the Dreamcast thread, but I'll list all of them here for quick reference. You can search for either Samsung, Toshiba, or TSSTcorp to find these drives.

IDE drives: SD-M2012C, SH-D162C, SH-D162D, TS-H352C, TS-H352D

SATA drives: SH-D163A, SH-D163B, TS-H353A, TS-H353B

82

(4 replies, posted in General discussion)

Don't all licensed CD discs have the "Compact Disc" logo and all licensed DVD discs have the "DVD ROM" logo? Maybe that could be added, too, to make it more beginner friendly.

Also, the guide should mention posting the layerbreak for dual-layer discs and also how to find it. Dual-layer discs can be identified by the dual ringcode.

I don't have access to a scanner right now, but I can tell you that each disc has a small section outside of the ringcode section in the data area that is a different shade from the rest of the disc's data area. The Swap Magic discs also have a lot of little rings that run through the data area. Here's a page with a small picture of a Swap Magic disc.

Here's a page about how the discs work, maybe it can help?

The CloneCD profile didn't help, it still won't dump the discs. One of mine is a DVD, so I think they all use the same weird protection. The discs seem to include retail game data, so they must do some trickery to boot on the PS2.

I figured they were. So, discs with protection like this can't be dumped?

I have 3 unlicensed PS2 discs: Swap Magic 3.6 CD & DVD, and a GameShark disc. All of these discs only dump about 6% before I get an unreadable sector error. None of the discs are scratched and they all stop at 6%, so they all must have some kind of protection. I've tried dumping them with all of my drives and none of them can dump more than 6%. Does anyone know what could be causing this to happen?

You can dump it if you want. Just leave a comment about it being included with the game, and also post the redump link to the game.

88

(9 replies, posted in General discussion)

Wow, thanks a lot! I thought that it wasn't good because it does have a small scratch, but if it matches then I'll submit it. Too bad I can't verify those other two discs I have with scratches, the hashes don't match. I still have to gather the ring info before I submit all of my dumps, so it might take me a day or two to submit them. Next I'll be working on PS2/3, SS/DC, and Xbox/360 dumps. I haven't dumped most of these type of discs before, so hopefully I won't run into any problems. Thanks again to both of you for your help.

89

(9 replies, posted in General discussion)

One of my drives slows down while copying the disc, but the others seem fine. It slows down at 70% done. The audio tracks seem fine. Here is some info about the disc and the hashes in dat format:

Serial: PBPX-95002, SCUS-94418
EXE date: 1997-07-25

<game name="Interactive CD Sampler Disc Volume 4">
        <description>Interactive CD Sampler Disc Volume 4</description>
        <rom name="Track01.bin" size="640174416" crc="fbedb40d" md5="34bd976fb93212d508706c090f36f18e" sha1="124146d68022f1ba72b8221be60d1a086725af06"/>
        <rom name="Track02.bin" size="26765760" crc="b6a2c6e6" md5="bdaebd20f84020d17dee50829628ebd2" sha1="f1d1320919acbb3bd083279718501c71d634facf"/>
        <rom name="Track03.bin" size="25530960" crc="74f6dff0" md5="036490fa03602818a106deea8b84427e" sha1="e6105fe0e24bd5bd1128d5ad4c136ab72708416a"/>
    </game>

90

(9 replies, posted in General discussion)

Well, I dumped it with a third drive and got the same hashes. This disc doesn't have EDC or any protections. There is a small scratch, so I won't submit this one until I can fix the disc and do another dump. I know what you mean about plextor's having issues, I found that out when I started dumping, the results didn't match my other drives.

P.S. Would anyone happen to know of a good way to fix a scratch? I have two other discs I can't verify because they both have 1 stubborn little scratch. I've tried to fix those, but nothing has worked.

91

(9 replies, posted in General discussion)

Thanks! The Copy Range function of EAC worked, though the interface was annoying. While you're typing in the values it keeps changing where you're typing after a few seconds, and in order for it to accept your input you have to click in the End Position text box. This bug should be added to the guide, I'm sure it would help many people out in the future.

Also, do you know the answer to my CDmage question? That disc had 2 audio tracks and I didn't have a problem dumping it, but the high amount of errors makes me think something might be wrong with it. It plays fine, and I tested every demo too. I'll try dumping it with a third drive and report if it's different.

While I was dumping my PlayStation collection I found two games with audio tracks that are smaller than the ones in the DB, the data tracks match the DB, though. The Games are: http://redump.org/disc/13075/ and http://redump.org/disc/13074/

The discs only have one audio track and they're just a bunch of zero's. One thing I noticed is that the gap is detected as 0 seconds for the audio track and 2 seconds for the data track. The data track has the scrambled sector -150 sectors back, and I calculated the combined and write offsets for 2 drives, one is a plextor, so I used px_d8 to verify. My audio tracks are 37,044,000 bytes, is this correct or is the 0 second gap an issue? I detected the gap using 3 drives and they all reported the same time.

I also have one more question. Is it possible for a good dump to have over 5,000 errors detected in CDmage? I have a new demo dump to submit, but I noticed the high amount of errors and thought I'd better ask before submitting it. There were not any read errors while dumping it, and I dumped it using 2 drives.