FM Towns Marty - Odd CD Issues

[cawley1]

Guys,
I finally took the plunge and got a Marty, for some more vintage Japanese goodness, even better I managed to source one in the UK, which has saved all the messing about with Yahoo Japan and potential customs fees issues.

I collected it from the parcel depot this morning, and as always, fired it up when I got in to ensure it was all working - it started up fine and I loaded an original Shadow of the Beast CD I have owned for a while. I played through the game for a good 10-15 minutes and the drive was accessing and loading fine, so all good. I turned it off and moved it to the table in living room, and there it stayed until I just plugged it back up the other side of the living room.

I had burned a few games to blank Maxell CD's (CHase HQ, Tatsujin 2, Bubble Bobble), but could not get any of them to work. I thought it was the way I was burning them, so I tried Bubble Bobble a couple of times. I should say that all of them auto loaded the Windows CD player after burning, so they should have been fine.

After a while of getting nowhere, I thought I would try Shadow of the Beast again, and I am getting the exact same issue with this - basically it doesn't matter where I attempt to load the CD from (power on, from pressing reset, or from closing the CD door on the 'coloured balls' screen) all that happens is the drive access light flickers for a while, then goes out (while the CD is still spinning), then the CD eventually stops spinning. The screen is black while the CD is being accessed.

The odd thing is if I go into the CD player by pressing Select on the 'coloured balls' screen, I can play the audio CD on the Shadow of the Beast disc - so I can't see it's necessarily laser or caps related.

As I have just bought it I have contacted the seller to see if he has any advice, so am not in a position to open it up until I have discussed with him - does anyone have any experience of a similar issue?

Let me know if you can help.
Thanks,
Paul

[caius]

I think the laser diode is about to die.I suggest you to buy a DOCBROWN (the CD-ROM ODE) from Deunan (like I did and it works great)