In my opinion it is very hard to find "hard facts". Just by burning a few CDs, we'll not come to objective test results beyond "works perfect" / "stutters" / "doesn't work"The console was optimized for a 72 minute seek table in the CD-ROM firmware of all consoles according to the no cash psx spx. That of course doesn’t mean it can’t do 80 minutes, but it is optimized for 72 minute discs, which did exist around launch (higher capacity discs like 74 min also existed around this time, even some developers from 1995 were asking if such disc would work in their dev units).
I really do wonder if 70 vs 63 would really see any difference because of the above.
A little brainstorming:
If anybody would be willing to implement some functions of Nero Disc Speed right on the PS1… (to not start from scratch QPxTool source might be helpful).
I doubt the PS1 drive will support reporting C1/C2 errors, but one could implement random seeks (far, near) and measure timings. If the drive has problems positioning on tighter track (maybe using 90min or even 100min blanks) this should show in seek times.
Max data rate measurement probably isn't going to help as the drive is max 2x only (though one could verify if full speed can be kept by just streaming 20MB at the beginning, the middle and at the end of a CD).
What also comes to my mind – if there is a RAW read command – verifying accuracy by checksumming over blocks of 100 RAW sectors each. If everything works normally, the last level error correction (which can be made visible to the user with RAW reading) is not needed and should be faithfully reproduced. If there is any reading trouble, and the PS1 would have to resort to (P-Parity/Q-Parity) for reconstructing during normal operation, the checksum for RAW sectors will mismatch.
Wonder if there is any PS1 modification for digital audio out. A clever way to verify accuracy of CDDA playback was mentioned here (of course the result was clear from the beginning when testing audiophile voodoo magic). Streaming a complete CDDA could also show weaknesses