[admin]

Yamaha changed their firmware in the 8424 CDR (and 8824 to our knowledge). We could not get a proper copy of a CDG disc even a 1x. We communicated this to Yamaha engineering, but they refused to admit there was a problem. Thus, MTU does not claim support for the Yamaha 8424 OR 8824 drives. We cannot fix this as it is a drive hardware problem.

The extraneous dots appearing problem you report is one of the failure modes that the Yamaha 8424 exhibited in our testing. Thus, I am certain your problem is your CDR will not properly support the CDG format.

It is incredible that a CDR can work fine for Audio and CDROM and the firmware fail for CDG! However, our testing proves this in the drives we buy-test-sell. We rejected 5 of 5 of the last Sony drives we tested. TDK and Plextor are our current choices, but we still have some failures with these also!

In our tests, we look for the following:
1. No dots within letters changing to different colors than they should be
2. No dropped dots within letters
3. No extraneous, random dots outside of letters
4. No lyrics at all appear (incredibly, this can happen even on drives that claim CDG capability)

If we see any of these problems, we reject the drive.