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why should that have been unplayable?
Apparently it could be played in many cd roms that had trays, but not ones where you had to insert.
You’re right.
The trays had a groove for a CD. So placing it in the groove it would work because its edges would always fall into that groove correctly all the way around the tray.
This, however, wouldn’t work on a slot loaded drive since they worked by having a set of arms with rollers that grab the edge of inserted disc and another arm with a roller that pushed it the rest of the way in from the opposite edge when it’s inserted enough.
You can see how this worked here on a DVD drive that uses the same setup. https://youtu.be/qi3v7X6BpAA
So there’s only ever 3 slim points of contact which is fine as long as it’s a circle. Yet the irregular shape here would cause it to get partially in and then pushed by the arms into the edge/internals of the drive.
Slot-loading CD drives would get jammed if you inserted anything other than a round, full-sized disc.
Irregular-shaped disc had to use drives that let you secure the disc to the spindle directly.
Slot-loading CD drives would get jammed if you inserted anything other than a round, full-sized disc.
The launch model Wii was an exception, with parts in there specifically for handling mini-discs for GameCube compatibility. The feature was quietly removed from later models.
Correct. There was a very complicated and delicate armature inside the drive that guided mini DVDs to the center. The revised Wii had a tray-loading drive, and no GameCube compatibility. So even though you could insert GameCube discs without issue, they wouldn’t play.
Those original Wiis still could not handle the Diddy Kong Racing disc due to the non-circular shape.
There was a model before the tray loading one that dropped GC support, too. I found out when the disc drive on my Wii died and I replaced it with an official later model drive and it couldn’t read Wind Waker anymore.
I didn’t realize there was an in-between model. So that’s what that black Wii was!
You inserted a GC disc and it didn’t jam? If a mini DVD went in properly and could be ejected, then those guides for the smaller discs were still there, just the software no longer registered the disc as a game.
yeah they released one with the same shell but no GC parts, it didn’t have the controller and memory card ports on the top either. i wonder what they filled all that empty space with.
It’s been a while, but I think the disc didn’t center as it went in and the system just spat it out. The rest of the system was an original model Wii, so the software should have still been there, but the newer drive couldn’t handle minidiscs. Launch model was apparently the RVL-001. The RVL-101 dropped GC support, but looked almost identical. The RVL-201 was the top loader model.
Nintendo HAD to know that people would try putting GameCube discs into the new Wiis. Maybe the RVL-101 has a simpler arm that just pushes the disc back out instead of trying to move it into place.
The Wii somehow was able to take both full-sized Wii disks and the smaller GameCube disks.
I was able to insert the mini disks that came with Lego Bionicles on my family’s iMac back in the day. Never had a head-shaped disk, though.
The 80mm minis were envisioned as “CD Singles,” and they actually were defined as part of the official CD standard. Therefore most CD players and drives including slot loaders actually were and are designed to work with them without incident. Typical tray loaders have a smaller indent below the main one to accept the smaller disks, and pretty much all horizontally oriented slot loaders will take them as well.
I’m just guessing but it would be unbalanced as it spins in the disk reader, and probably wobble up and down making the laser inaccurate?
i think CDs spin faster - there were some business-card sizex CD ROMs back in the day. nb data is read from the inside out
Data is indeed read from the inner ring outwards, as anyone with a CD burner in the late '90’s and 2000’s is very familiar with.
For audio and video playback, the disk is spun faster at the beginning and progressively more slowly towards the outer edge, a process known as Constant Angular Velocity playback, because more linear distance is covered at the same RPM the larger your circle gets, i.e. the closer you are to the edge. This is no problem for audio playback at “1x” speed because this tops out at a paltry 500 RPM or so.
For data reads, however, most drives use Constant Linear Velocity and spin the disk at the same speed all the time. That means your data throughput is higher at the edges of the disk. The prevalence of 2x, 4x, 16x, 24x, 40x, 52x, etc. PC CD (and DVD, etc.) also means that those drives will spin a disk way faster than a regular CD player will which can definitely cause a problem with irregularly shaped disks like the one in OP’ photo. They would also inevitably only achieve their rated whatever-x speed when reading at the very edge of a full disk. (You mean the marketing department was deliberately misleading??? Say it ain’t so!)
Those little business card disks were nonstandard but would work in most tray loading drives, and held a whopping 30 megs.
It looks like it’s pretty balanced. The chin appears to be slightly further from the center than the hat to account for the extra weight of the ears. With how leverage works you don’t need much more weight to balance as long as it’s just a little further.
The tracking on the lasers for CDs is pretty crazy, since at those scales even well balanced CDs wobble like crazy. If it had to be super flat for it to work, each disc would be much too expensive. And as soon as it got dirty or warped in the sun, it wouldn’t work anymore. In reality CDs are pretty rugged and can take a lot of abusive before they can’t be easily read in even a cheap reader. It’s amazing technology really. It’s kinda crazy to think about how many holes per sec the laser can track and read for something like a blu-ray disc running at multiple times playback speed for data transfer.
This would play just fine in a snap-in (like a Discman) or tray loading CD player. It might give slot loaders some trouble but it looks like it still describes most of a 120mm circle so it would probably work fine in those as well.
For audio playback. At 1x speed.
The real problem with these novelty shaped disks is when you stick them in a fast PC CD-ROM drive, they’re usually badly unbalanced and when your drive dutifully tries to spin them at 8,000, 15,000, or 20,000 RPM when it indexes the disk or when someone tries to copy it – not outside the realm of possibility for a commodity 40x drive – the disk will warp and vibrate like crazy and in some cases eventually crack and then outright explode inside the drive.
I once had to disassemble somebody’s drive and tweezer out the sparkly bits of a Ranma 1/2 CD that I discovered, when rearranging the pieces back together on the workbench like a jigsaw puzzle, was one of these damn novelty disks that was shaped like Ranma-chan’s head. The largest fragment left over was smaller than a dime, and surprisingly the drive still worked after I unjammed it and got all of the glitter out of it ultimately using compressed air.
These were uncommon, but not unheard of. For instance, Metallica also infamously released this fucking thing:
…Which actually was balanced, but only until your garden variety careless owner snapped the very tip off of one of the points.
Soundtrack was damn nice though. David Wise (and Kirkhope from other Rare games of the same-ish era) wrote some excellent stuff.
My mood: the bluray player that cost €140 10 years back can’t recognize modern blurays with a 20 years old film anymore.
Why did i buy a bluray with a 20 years old film, there’s Netflix? Because they compress to death and you can’t backup the video there.
