At least it was unique
At least it was unique
22 comments
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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.
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Soundtrack was damn nice though. David Wise (and Kirkhope from other Rare games of the same-ish era) wrote some excellent stuff.
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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.
22 comments
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.
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.
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.
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
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.