Since I got the Super Mario Bros. Edition Game & Watch, I’ve been playing with it occasionally, since it’s a good time spender. I must say that I’m kind of addicted to playing Super Mario Bros. The Lost Levels. The game is so hard that I can’t even pass the 3rd level.
I’ve also been playing Ball, but I don’t like when the game starts as it’s very slow. However, as it progresses, I’m enjoying that challenge. The other thing I like is how the Game & Watch saves the progress so I can continue playing where I stopped last time.
Because of how I like this product, I decided to get a case to keep it safely stored. You can find a bunch of cases on Amazon, but I went with the ALKOO Case:
The case seem to be of good quality and it’s sure to keep our Game & Watch safe.
The interior is soft and allows us to store the Game & Watch as well as a charging cable:
The Game & Watch fits perfectly inside and is easy to take out too.
This way, it is not gathering dust, especially on the screen, since it is not protected by anything.
This case comes in 2 colors: Black and Blue. You can get them on Amazon at the following links:
Movies added, removed, and coming soon at Redbox – April 6, 2021
Note that Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar seem to be available just in Blu-Ray as of this morning as Redbox’s system seem to have not made the DVD version available yet. This should be fixed soon.
Movies that can no longer be reserved
DVD
211
A Quiet Place
Chappaquiddick
Deepwater Horizon
Future World
I Am Elizabeth Smart
Lean On Pete
Social Animals
The Leisure Seeker
Blu-Ray
A Quiet Place
Deepwater Horizon
4K UHD
A Quiet Place
Movies Coming Soon
April 13th
DVD: The Penthouse
DVD: Phobias
DVD: Willy’s Wonderland
April 20th
Blu-Ray: Vanquish
DVD: Vanquish
April 27th
DVD: Cosmic Sin
DVD: 12 Strong (Back again)
May 4th
DVD: The Virtuoso
Blu-Ray: Every Breath You Take
DVD: Every Breath You Take
Blu-Ray: Judas and the Black Messiah
DVD: Judas and the Black Messiah
DVD: The Little Things
More upcoming releases
DVD: The Vault
DVD: The Mauritanian
Blu-Ray: The Marksman
DVD: The Marksman
DVD: Minari
Blu-Ray: Tom & Jerry
DVD: Tom & Jerry
Blu-Ray: Chaos Walking
4K UHD: Chaos Walking
DVD: Chaos Walking
Blu-Ray: City Of Lies
DVD: City Of Lies
DVD: Nobody
4K UHD: Godzilla vs. Kong
Hidizs adds support for MQA on their AP80 and AP80 Pro DAPs
It seems Hidizs released today a firmware for the Hidizs AP80 and AP80 Pro Digital Audio Players (DAP). The only improvement here seems to be the addition of MQA support.
The new firmware version is 1.5 for the AP80 Pro and 2.3 for the AP80
The official changelog for both firmware states the same:
Update Content:
1. Add MQA support.
You can download the firmware for these players at the following links:
These discs can be burned up to 12x. However, my drives can only burn them up to 10x. I don’t remember owning a drive that actually allowed me to burn at 12x. For some reason, they all can burn these at 10x.
The discs are top logo branded:
On the data side, it has a dark grey color:
Once burned, it is a bit darker. Notice in the inner ring the light color and then it turns darker.
The burned shade will depend on the burner used. In this particular case, the burned area is a bit lighter. Note that, however, the disc had previous data before, which is why the rest of it looks darker.
The discs are perfectly compatible on my Oakcastle Portable CD Player and this is how I’m testing them before finally moving the disc to a CD-R.
Overall, I’m pleased with these discs.
You can get them on Amazon at the following link:
Unboxing the Game & Watch: Super Mario Bros. Edition
Today, March 31, 2021 is supposed to be the last day to buy the Game & Watch: Super Mario Bros. Edition. I got it this past weekend and I’m here to show it to you.
The box where it came is very well designed, with high quality graphics. It also has another set of graphics when we begin to open it.
On the back, we have the usual product description and a list of games it comes with.
Once we open the box, we can see the game system is well protected. We also see the USB-C cable for charging and the user manual.
Let’s take the Game & Watch out of the box:
It is a small handheld and is very lightweight.
This Game & Watch comes with 3 games. Super Mario Bros:
Super Mario Bros. 2: The Lost Levels:
And Game & Watch: Ball, featuring Mario:
It also has a Mario Clock:
Finally, here we can see this Game & Watch compared to the Game Boy Micro. It is very similar in size, altough the Game & Watch is slightly bigger:
Did you also got this Game & Watch: Super Mario Bros. Edition?
You can still get it on Amazon at the following link:
Movies added, removed, and coming soon at Redbox – March 30, 2021
In this post, We’ll be looking at some Slim IDE drives and how well they work with a Verbatim CD-RW disc. The drives we will be seeing are the Optiarc AD-7561A, Teach DW-224E-C, and the Toshiba SD-R6252.
I started first with the Toshiba SD-R6252 which is the drive with the oldest manufacturing date:
This drive was manufactured on July 2004. In my tests, it seems to read DVDs fine, but it fails to read CD-Rs, often with an “Unable to Recover TOC” message in ImgBurn. This drive supports CD and DVD writing.
The drive detects the disc and gives us burning speeds of 4x and 10x:
I initiated the burning process at 10x. It was able to erase the disc, but was surprised at the following message it gave me:
For some reason, it thinks the disc is 0 MB. However, pressing OK makes the disc burn successfully, or so I thought. Turns out this drive seem to ignore ImgBurn’s request to cycle the tray, and when the verification starts, it just freezes and starts making seek noises. This drive was also the noisiest drive. It seems the laser makes some noises when burning. Ultimately, I ejected the drive manually by disconnecting and reconnecting the USB cable. Then, ImgBurn somehow say the disc is “empty” yet it shows the old Table of Contents of the disc:
Maybe the drive couldn’t handle burning at 10x, so I restarted it at 4x:
But again, it froze at verification:
The disc seems to be lightly burned:
The result is a failure for this drive. It isn’t able to correctly burn these discs. But maybe it’s the drive that’s somehow dead for CD’s, since it has issues reading most of them but reads fine CD-ROMs.
My next attempt is to use my TEAC DW-224E-C. Here, initially the drive is unable to read the disc as the Toshiba drive corrupted it.
It does not let me do anything as it doesn’t read it. I had to jump to the Optiarc drive which was successful at detecting the disc and allowing me to burn it.
This unit was successful at burning and verifying the disc.
You can see that the lighter burned area is now darker.
I then placed the disc in the TEAC drive where it was able to read and verify it successfully too:
It also allows us to burn the disc again, so even when it was written, I performed an erase operation first, which blanked the disc:
From the above drives, only the Toshiba SD-R6252 failed to burn it. Both the TEAC and Optiarc drives were able to burn and verify it fine. Maybe the Toshiba drive is bad, as it fails to read CD-Rs correctly, sometimes unable to read the Table of Contents and sometimes failing to properly seek. However, that same drive is able to read DVDs without any issues, so maybe the CD laser is bad.
For the TEAC and Optiarc drives, the final result is a working, playable disc. The Optiarc drive is able to burn these discs at 4x and 10x. I didn’t test burning it at 4x. The TEAC drive does not show the supported burning speeds on ImgBurn like it did for the other 2 drives, but in reality, it burns it at the expected 10x.
In my last post of the Philips BD-R DL 50GB discs, I shared the quality scan of the discs burned at 8x on the Pioneer BDR-2212 drive. Here, I’m sharing the quality scans of these discs burned on the same drive at 6x.
Scanned with the LiteOn iHBS112 at 4x
Scanned with the LG WH16NS58 at 4x
Overall, it is a good burn. As we saw in the previous post, it seems the drive manages to burn the second layer better. The LG drive, however, seems to have some spikes at the end while the LiteOn drive had more spikes on the first layer. The discs were all readable on both drives.
The burning took about aproximately 30 minutes, meanwhile the 8x burns takes about 25 minutes.
Early this week, I ordered more Double Layer Blu-Ray discs. Unfortunately, the Philips 10pk BD-R DLs that were at $9 each were out of stock, so I had 2 options, both listed at $11 dollars:
Philips BD-R DL 10pk – Logo surface
HP BD-R DL 10pk – Logo surface
I decided to go with the HP ones since I’ve already tested the Philips BD-R DL 10pk printable discs, and maybe the Logo surface ones were the same CMC Magnetics discs. With the HP ones, I have the opportunity to review these and see if they are the same or different than the Philips discs. Because the Verbatim 100GB discs are still very high on price and seem to be low on stock, I need to get more BD-R DLs than usual. This is why I ordered 5 of these packs again.
Basically, last time I wasted a full 10pk of the Philips discs doing tests, until realizing that the Pioneer BDR-2212 drive was the one that handled them best. Will the same happen here again? We’ll find out.
The disc packaging is very similar to the Philips discs, except that these spindles have a paper on the top as well as the branding on the sides. Both were made in Taiwan. They are also rated to be burned up at 6x, although the burning speeds available depends on the burner capabilities and firmware itself.
Opening it, we have the shiny top logo surface discs:
The discs does look to be very well made. The data surface also look very smooth too.
It also has a dark gold-colored look, as opposed to the dark grey color of the Philips discs. This is important because it may tell us that the manufacturer is different.
My first thought was to insert this into the Panasonic UJ-260, to see what it thinks of this disc.
ImgBurn says these discs are made by Verbatim! The media code ID is VERBAT-IMf-000. The Panasonic UJ-260 can burn them at 2x and 6x. This is higher than the RITEK-DR3-000 and CMCMAG-DI6-000 discs, both of which could be burned up to 4x on this drive (Note that the CMCMAG-DI6-000 failed on this drive, but it could burn the RITEK-DR3-000 perfectly fine).
Given this, let’s try to burn a disc with Nero at 6x.
It did seem to start burning great, but unfortunately, the disc failed to burn with just a generic burning error:
This is the first time the Panasonic fails on me while burning a disc. This is also unexpected, given that Verbatim discs should be the best of the best. Usually, this drive would burn a disc fine but may fail on the verification, like it did on the CMCMAG-DI6-000 discs. Maybe it couldn’t handle burning at 6x.
As we can see, it failed at the first layer.
My next try was of course, on the Pioneer BDR-2212. It burned all of the Philips spindles flawlessly, altough on just one of the discs, it wrote a bad sector and this drive was able to read it back while the others failed on that sector. I discarded this disc, but the others wrote and verified just fine.
The Pioneer drive reports that this disc can be burned at up to 8x.
I fired up Nero and attempted to burn the disc at 8x. The CMCMAG-DI6-000 burned great at this speed and the verification went really well too. No speed slowdowns happened at all when reading them.
Nero was able to burn and verify this disc successfully. In fact, it also read back fine in my LiteOn iHBS112.
The finished disc has a dark grey burned color. Here we can see it compared to a burned CMCMAG-DI6-000 disc:
The CMCMAG-DI6-000 on the left has a darker burned color than the VERBAT-IMf-000 disc on the right.
Next are the usual quality scans. I really don’t pay attention to it, as it’s been proven that the drives can handle high amounts of LDC/BIS numbers and the only discs that failed on me were scratched or rotten ones. This happened some years ago, but none of the discs I’ve burned so far has given me issues.
Test results of an 8x burn
The LiteOn iHBS112 seem to read the disc just great but reports high numbers on the first layer and a bit on the 2nd one before going back down to numbers that stays within the limits. Besides this result, the disc was completely readable.
Now, let’s move on to scanning and verifying it on the LG WH16NS58:
The LG drive stayed between the tolerance numbers except once it reached the 20GB mark, where it went up. It stabilized again on the 2nd layer at around 29GB and stayed within its limits. The disc once again was completely readable according to Nero DiscSpeed.
Test results of a 6x burn
I burned a disc at 6x, which was successful too. The difference between a 6x and 8x burn is about 5 minutes.
Now, let’s see how it scanned:
Scanned on the LiteOn iHBS112
Scanned on the LG WH16NS58
The scan on the LiteOn drive is very similar to the 8x burn. On the LG drive, however, it seems the first layer was burned better. The start of the 2nd layer did present a spike but seem to correct itself. Remember that the Pioneer drive performs some calibration while burning. It usually does it at around 56% after starting to burn the second layer of a BD-R DL disc. The rest of the disc burned with good quality and no spikes.
Even with those spikes on both scans, the disc read fine on both instances.
ScanDisc test on the LiteOn iHBS112 drive
ScanDisc test on the LG WH16NS58
Burning on the Panasonic UJ260 at 2x
I decided to give this drive another try, but this time burning at 2x. Surprisingly, it handled burning it and succeeded in the verification stage.
Testing on the LiteOn and LG drives looked way, way better too
We can see once again that the LG scanned it a bit better, but the difference between the LiteOn and LG is not so much. Overall, this looks way better than the Pioneer burns at 6x and 8x.
ScanDisc test on the LiteOn iHBS112 drive
ScanDisc test on the LG WH16NS58 drive
This is very good to know because before the Pioneer drive, I was always burning on the Panasonic drive. This means that the only media this drive cannot handle well is the CMCMAG-DI6-000, but it could be because of the tint of those discs that I mentioned on that review and may not be the case with other branded CMCMAG discs.
Conclusion
The discs from the batch I got are all Verbatim 6x media. They are burning reliably on the Pioneer drive and at 2x on the Panasonic drive. The LG and LiteOn drives can read back the data on all of the above cases regardless of the quality scans without any speed slowdown. I’d recommend this media because of how cheap it is, considering they seem to be Verbatim media but branded for HP.
You can order these discs on Amazon at the following link:
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