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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.
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.
