I got this from Maxconsole.. _______________________________________________________________ Ripper Team On DRE posted by malloc at 11:28 pm on 18-03-2005 Quote from http://www.ripper3.com (Quote) Before we start talking about GC's DRE we must come back a little bitinto the PS2's burning coil issue. PS2 has Disc Reading Errors but you don't get an explicit message onthe screen. All what you need to do is to adjust the laser's potentiometer, to clean the lens or to adjust horizontal alignment of the mechanics. It can't be corrected with software patch or any other miracle software manipulation. If the laser is poor then reading is poor. Disc Reading Errors on PS2 look as choppy sound and video but you don't get a message on the screen. PS2 tries to read, read and read and finally it increases voltages supplied to the laser diode and coils until it burns. Here is the problem! Especially PSTwo behaves not properly. It tries to read even when it doesn't see the disc's surface, it tries to focus the lens at any cost causing well known metallic sound and then smelt of burnt insulation GC has some kind of protection against PS2 syndrome built in. When GC can't read then it rejects media immediately not causing lens oscillations and finally not making you feel the very known smelt If somebody is planning to disable this protection mechanism he will contribute to your new headache … burnt GC laser Please note that both power circuits which are driving coils, sled and spindle are very small, without heat sinks. If you let them to read unreadable media you will dissipate some unwanted watts and you will burn the device. If you Google a little bit you will find plenty of official forums. If you read them carefully you will learn that many brand new GC machines have reading problems of new and not scratched DVD's. Many people are fooled by forums belonging to the so called scene. GC laser simply doesn't like DVDR media. If somebody says that the tenth update will cure DREs he is not telling the truth. He can only make you sick of returned machines with characteristic smelt. Prepare yourself for mass BA/LA/RS or whatever replacements The Ripper Team will monitor the situation very carefully and will issue the flash update for the Ripper///GC when it is necessary and if it is necessary. Until now our chip is bug free. Try it as many others did it already. We don't want to tell you too much but we know something for certain. We can give you one advice. Please read our specification carefully and one sentence particularly: Extremely good timings and logic levels on the high speed GC bus. Try to use the scope and compare The Ripper///GC with others, and finally try to finish that sentence We love to give such puzzles to our students We strongly forewarn you against experimenting with untested anti DRE solutions on your customers. Remember, you sell pre modified machines to the end users. They will flash their chips without reflection, blindly believing that new solution will cure something. What will happen if they start returning dead and burnt lasers? Please don't play with laser protection The Ripper///GC is not easy reprogrammable but it obligates us to make a good product from the beginning. Both The Ripper///GC and The Ripper3.1 can be reprogrammed by external flash programmer with help of small PCI-DIL adapter. Updates are dangerous in general. Also original products can be cloned by analyzing differences in software updates so we prefer to make bug free product from the beginning. If we recall the history of software updates of some well known chips we can say that updates has finished as fast as they appeared! Some of them were giving you updates almost every week, repairing endless bugs and creating others. How do you resellers can live with it? What do you say to your customers, end users? Do you say them that you sell not working product which will be updated in the unknown future or what? Some other discoveries… 1. The Propeller blade effect Before you burn particular DVDR please inspect the disc visually. GC drive is sensitive on propeller blade effect of DVD media. Before you burn it please put blank DVDR into opened GC and look horizontally if your particular blank disc rotates smoothly. Look at the outer edge of the disc if there is up and down movement or not. You can make a simple test. Find the blank DVDR with the huge propeller effect and burn 2 discs with the same image. You will notice that smoothly rotating DVD works but the second one doesn't even start. Some new original games from the shop are distorted from the beginning and not modified consoles can't read them properly. 2. The heat You can make another test. Disconnect the cooling fan from your GC. You will notice that after some minutes you will get one big DRE. We assume that laser unit is overheated causing poor Signal to Noise ratio. You have the oven just below the laser. If the cooling is not adequate then it can cause DVD to distort (propeller blade effect). It explains why DVDs, even silver originals, stop being read properly after some time of using it. So we come back to the focus coil failures on PS2 when the lens must move up and down to balance the propeller blade effect. By disabling protection mechanism you will probably kill the laser coils and the coil driver and you will need another summ0ne plus some tons of replacement parts Try to use DVD+R because in our opinion they work better. Use Verbatim or TDK only and test them for distortion. Remove DVD just after you stop playing. Conclusion GC drive has some reading problems in general. It has too slow processor for tracking the distortion of DVD media but it has excellent protection mechanism against laser failure All rumors regarding the possibility of correcting DRE in software are only rumors and we call it La Guerre des Puces (/Quote) News Source: http://www.ripper3.com/r3-news.htm
their bound to say that, they are in direct competiton with viper! I think that comment is just one big flame against the Viper, and lets face it the Ripper GC needs all the help it can get seeing its not even in the same league as the viper! Roll on Cobra 1.0, lets all hold judgement until then
By the way, DRE can be fixed with software, if someone could do bios that gc tries to re-read disc or ignore DRE and not just give DRE screen and tilt the game.
It is down to the bios as much as anything else, pour exemple cobra 0.3 has better compatability to 0.4, I dont know whether it is possible that 1.0 could include a software firmware upgrade for the drive, but I think the whole laser burning out is a bit ridiculous sounding...
