Ah ok that makes sense. I never had mine fail back in the day even though I was playing tons of CD-R’s, but that’s my n=1 experience.
More recently we’ve all been using GDEMU ODEs to replace our drives and also heavy use of the BBA (broadband adapter) for development, so very little use of actual disc drives.
FWIW I’ve found the rest of the system to be incredibly resilient, I’ve never seen a motherboard or CPU/GPU chip failure ever even after some pretty gnarly hack job mods and other dumb stuff haha. Same with the OG Xbox consoles.
Disc drive issues make more sense though. Thanks for the info.
As pointed out in a more eloquent reply, disc read failures. Games would take more and more time to load until complete failure or the console would just stop loading completely and would no longer boot up. I wasn't in a position to hack hardware back then :/
It’s unfortunately more or less impossible to get an original GDEMU because the creator makes (or made) such small batches and didn’t believe in preorders or wait lists, so the only way to get one is to buy a clone on AliExpress or eBay.
I would love to support the original creator and not buy clones, but after years of waiting I gave up and so did everyone else I know. Luckily the quality of the clones is great and they work just as well as the original (some early models had compatibility issues with a very small number of games but that’s long since been resolved).
For BBA’s the only way to get one is to buy used on eBay or from a Japanese auction site. They’re not cheap though, somewhere in the $100-200 range I think, but if you do a lot of DC homebrew dev they’re absolutely worth it if you can afford it.
Otherwise you can buy a serial adapter for much cheaper and use that, but the transfer speed is significantly slower.
More recently we’ve all been using GDEMU ODEs to replace our drives and also heavy use of the BBA (broadband adapter) for development, so very little use of actual disc drives.
FWIW I’ve found the rest of the system to be incredibly resilient, I’ve never seen a motherboard or CPU/GPU chip failure ever even after some pretty gnarly hack job mods and other dumb stuff haha. Same with the OG Xbox consoles.
Disc drive issues make more sense though. Thanks for the info.