Does your game library suffer from Disc rot?

People claiming "LOL THIS NEVER HAPPENS" are hilarious.
No, disc deterioration is not a rare case of bad luck, it's unavoidable on the long run.

Many of you claiming "my old discs are all fine" are probably already affected by this, even if in a barely noticeable -or not noticeable at all- extent. And it's going to get worse over time. It's a fact.

And let me laugh at people pointing their musical CDs as example, too. Do you have any idea to how much damaged a musical CD needs to be before becoming glitchy/unreadable?
Let's just say that for software is sufficient a lot less deterioration.
 
For people concerned by this. If your collection is a library, look into ways to back it up and way to make these function how you want them to (or if an emulator is an acceptable compromise).

Thinking about this, looking at my Gamecube and Wii collection one of the games I'm worried about is the game boy player startup disc. I am unable to replicate the functionality that brings without the disc.

But anyway, going back to concern. If you view these old games as an investment, you might want to consider cashing in sometime or other (though if Suikoden 2 was your retirement plan...). Likewise as the article in the OP shows, check your purchases.

Mendoza said:
Huh. Never heard of it, but my OCD triggered so I decided to take a look at a few random games.
If I'm understanding correctly what to look for, my Sonic CD and Panzar Dragoon seem to have 1 or 2 small holes visible by using a pocket LED light. What a bummer.

Do these little holes guarantee that at some point during gameplay that it will become unplayable, or music will stop working?
Click to expand...
Depends on whee the hole is.

Sonic CD is track1 data, rest music. So you can work out mathematically how much of the disc is track 1 (data is stored from inside to out) and could pin-point the problem to a track. Odds are its a music track though.

If panzer dragoon is the same format you can do so there.

So in a way these older games are currently more affected by the problem but less likely to be unplayable as a result. It still will be a problem nonetheless.
 
jmdajr said:
I thought this was just a laser disc problem.
Click to expand...

Me to... guess not...

from wiki:
Many early LDs were not manufactured properly; sometimes a substandard adhesive was used to sandwich together the two sides of the disc.[citation needed] The adhesive contained impurities that were able to penetrate the lacquer seal layer and chemically attack the metalized reflective aluminium layer, causing it to oxidize and lose its reflective characteristics. This was a problem that was termed "laser rot" among LD enthusiasts, also called "color flash" internally by LaserDisc-pressing plants. Some forms of laser rot could appear as black spots that looked like mold or burned plastic which cause the disc to skip and the movie to exhibit excessive speckling noise. But, for the most part, rotted discs could actually appear perfectly fine to the naked eye.

Later optical standards have been known to suffer similar problems, including a notorious batch of defective CDs manufactured by Philips-DuPont Optical at their Blackburn, Lancashire facility in England during the late 1980s/early 1990s.
 
Even though some try to minimise this it seems, I've started backing up my classic martial arts movies already to mkv files.
Besides tons of classic games on disk games from PC-Engine onward, I have an extensive movie library as well including some rare versions like original prints of Drunken Master (Bonzai Media version) and Drunken Master 2 (Thakral version), The original Ju-On The Curse V-Cinema ones as well as the nearly complete set of all the Hong Kong Legend DVDs.

No way in hell am I gonna take a chance of these getting destroyed without having a mint backup copy of all of them. Even though 4GB for an mkv version of an SD DVD movie seems a little large. ;)
 
I don't know if I have any, I have a shitload of old games. I never noticed anything without a light source so should still be good enough to finish ripping if nothing else.
 
I have about 800 movie DVDs in binders. Why are binders/spindles more cause for worry than if they were in their original case btw?

I suppose there's no harm in getting a blu-ray recorder and backing them up.

I don't have a lot of Saturn/Dreamcast/PS1 games to worry about (but but Shenmue 2!), and I suppose I'll have to say goodbye to those GC/PS2/XBOX and newer console games one day.

Every thing/body dies... :|
 
Tempy said:
I have about 800 movie DVDs in binders. Why are binders/spindles more cause for worry than if they were in their original case btw?

I suppose there's no harm in getting a blu-ray recorder and backing them up.

I don't have a lot of Saturn/Dreamcast/PS1 games to worry about (but but Shenmue 2!), and I suppose I'll have to say goodbye to those GC/PS2/XBOX and newer console games one day.

Every thing/body dies... :|
Click to expand...

I would assume due to the friction? I've had plenty of cds/dvds get the paint/data coating ripped off by the binder. There's nothing contacting the surface in the jewel case, there is something contacting it on a spindle or in a binder.
 
This has been a really humid summer.

I've started storing some of my rare games in ziplock bags with silica gel packets. The bags are smaller, sandwich sized and this got me thinking. How dry is too dry? With the amount of silica gel in the packets (brand new) and the small space, I'm guessing these things have to be close to 10% humidity or lower. At what point does the silica start drying out the glue that holds the label to the disc.
 
Embrace DD, packrats.

Joking aside, as a retro guy I never found collecting CD/DVD based games appealing. Carts are just more appealing. Love dat plastic.
 
Ughh.... I just went and checked a bunch of my Sega CD games. A whole shit load of them have pin holes. Final Fight, Sol Feace, Ecco, Sonic CD... :(

Fuuuuuck I'm not even going to check the expensive Sega CD games I own, let alone my PS1 collection. Fuck. I'm going to feign ignorance. I literally don't want to know how much more of my collection is effected by this.

Are there any known ways of preventing this from getting worse? When you all say "don't stack games" are you referring to them as being in or out of the case?
 
Foxix said:
Ughh.... I just went and checked a bunch of my Sega CD games. A whole shit load of them have pin holes. Final Fight, Sol Feace, Ecco, Sonic CD... :(

Fuuuuuck I'm not even going to check the expensive Sega CD games I own, let alone my PS1 collection. Fuck. I'm going to feign ignorance. I literally don't want to know how much more of my collection is effected by this.

Are there any known ways of preventing this from getting worse? When you all say "don't stack games" are you referring to them as being in or out of the case?
Click to expand...

Eh, I'd guess that unless your PS1 games are stored quite badly, they're probably fine. This "little pinholes" problem seems, in my experience at least, to be MUCH more common on Sega CD discs than for most other systems...
 
It does happen.

A few weeks ago I dug out my copy of Outrun 2 for Xbox, game didn't load. It's mint and I've had it from new, then on close inspection I could see discolouration around the edge of the disc. My first thought was damp but case and inlay were fine.

It wasnt expensive to get another disc but yes this is a real thing and yes I look after my collection of games.
 
Burai said:
I work for a company that archives data to CD and we learned about disk rot the hard way. A customer broke a disk and wanted us to retrieve the data from our backup disk from 10 years ago.
Click to expand...

You burned them right?
Those get bad after a while. That's why you shouldn't use that method to archive data. It's normal. Pressed discs are another matter. Had no problems at all with those.

I own so many LucasArts + Sierra games on CD (effectively more than 20 years old). None of those are faulty. I copied them onto SD-cards anyway.

There are surely defective print runs out there though.
 
As far as can tell, they are all good.

I transferred my PSX games to protective storage years ago, since jewel cases aren't exactly well known for keeping disks pristine over time.

I should do the same thing with my PS2 games soon.
 
WolvenOne said:
As far as can tell, they are all good.

I transferred my PSX games to protective storage years ago, since jewel cases aren't exactly well known for keeping disks pristine over time.

I should do the same thing with my PS2 games soon.
Click to expand...

What do you mean by protective storage?
 
Yes, this phenomenon is called Rotational Velocidensity and it causes data stored on discs to disappear.

Here, read this expert analysis on the matter.

Science said:
Rotational velocidensity affects all audio files encoded with lossy compression. These include mp3, aac, and ogg.
There seems to be a lot of misconceptions in the music community regarding the differences between 320kbps mp3 and FLAC format. It is true that 320kbps is technically as good as FLAC, but there are other reasons to get music in a lossless format.

Hearing the difference now isn’t the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression, while MP3 is ‘lossy’. What this means is that for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA – it’s about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocidensity. You don’t want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media.

I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrange…well don’t get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren’t stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you’ll be glad you did.
Click to expand...
 
Nope, still have old PC games on CD that work just fine and plenty of old DVD based games as well. It's dry here though so that might help me.
 
No, my collection is pretty pristine. Stuff i was worried about I ended up putting in a binder. But everything is still looking good.
 
I've been playing through a used copy of Pokemon LeafGreen recently and couldn't progress because the cart was apparently defective/damaged.

10 hours into the game and right before getting to the S.S. Anne captain's cabin the game locks up. Only happens if you've used a game shark or if the game is damaged, and apparently the glitch doesn't exist in FireRed. :|
 
This is one of the reasons why I converted all of my PS1 games to work on my PSP (or Vita if they get it working when the next kernel hack gets released). Besides the convenience factor, I'll be able to keep playing my games if something like this does happen (because I'll cry if my copy of Suikoden II goes and I'm not able to play it).
 
Not that I've noticed, but it's been a while since I played a lot of my PS1 games. I've had it happen to some older DVDs and some rewritable CDs. It's bound to happen eventually. I just wonder when we'll start to see it on a large scale.
 
Foxix said:
Ughh.... I just went and checked a bunch of my Sega CD games. A whole shit load of them have pin holes. Final Fight, Sol Feace, Ecco, Sonic CD... :(

Fuuuuuck I'm not even going to check the expensive Sega CD games I own, let alone my PS1 collection. Fuck. I'm going to feign ignorance. I literally don't want to know how much more of my collection is effected by this.

Are there any known ways of preventing this from getting worse? When you all say "don't stack games" are you referring to them as being in or out of the case?
Click to expand...

Damn, sorry to ear that, Sega CD games are so awesome! :(
And now I'm afraid to check out my PS2 collection!...
 
Much of my PC and PS1/PS2 collection was affected by disc rot, in particular, quite a number of expensive games that I had. 20-30 titles or so. (It's a bit of a long story on how they got damaged, no need to bore you, suffice to say they weren't kept in the best of conditions by others, and I had no access to them for a number of years).

Over the past couple of years, I've been slowly trying to re-buy the damaged games, but it's been slow going but I'm getting there. However with my current financial troubles, it's stalled for now.

Gotta say though, thrift stores have been a blessing when it came to rebuilding what was lost, especially when compared to ebay prices for some of the titles i had to replace.

I'll take some photos of my damaged games and post them here when I can.
 
I still have my Battle Arena Toshinden pack-in disc that came with my PS1. No issues with it.

Only cds that ever die out on me are music cds that I burn myself.
 
While it's reality, I hate this thread that exists as a reminder that this shit exists and the fact that disc rot itself exists. =_=

/legitthreadwhining (C'mon you know what I mean. :P)
 
As others have mentioned, I have music CDs from the 80s that are still pristine.

The only disc rot I have ran into are old, cheap CD-RWs where the burning layer has rotted away.

I think are you pretty safe with games and music as long as they are taken care of and kept out of harsh conditions.
 
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