Converting Game CD's into images... what to use? \ VOGONS

Converting Game CD's into images... what to use?

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First post, by dexvx

Posted on 2017-03-22, 20:36

dexvx Offline

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I have a bunch of older game CD's (some with audio tracks) and was interested in converting them into software CD images. I have a modern storage backend, so keeping the data or data amount is not a problem. The only system I have with an optical drive is a Lenovo Thinkpad i5/IvyBridge with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS installed. I tried the following:

1. dd -i /dev/cdrom -o cdname.iso

For a CD like Quake2, it doesn't seem to copy over the "sound track" portion of it. The ISO file is about 375MB, whereas Linux reports total CD size around 650MB.

2. Brasero into bin/cue format

Again, trying my working Quake2 CD, it creates a .bin and .cue file, around 700MB in size. However, it gave an valid format in WinCDEmu (on a modern Windows 10 system). On my legacy Win98SE/MagicISO system, it actually freezes the system.

So now I'm back to the drawing board. Any ideas on what to use to create these images?

Reply 1 of 5, by firage

Posted on 2017-03-22, 21:00

firage Offline

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There's a recent discussion here: Backing up DOS era CD-ROM games?

My big-red-switch 486

Reply 2 of 5, by Jo22

Posted on 2017-03-23, 00:01

Jo22 Offline

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MagicISO freezes some times. Try Daemon Tools 3.47 for Win9x.
My opinion to that matter is written here.

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 3 of 5, by zerker

Posted on 2017-03-23, 22:09

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This is my CD ripping script from Linux using cdrdao.

1cdrdao read-cd --read-raw --datafile "$1.bin"  --driver generic-mmc:0x20000 --device /dev/sr0 "$1.toc"
2toc2cue "$1.toc" "$1.cue"

Just put it in a .sh file and provide the desired image filename as a command-line argument. The toc2cue utility is included with the same package on Debian-based distros. Once it's all finished, you can discard the .toc file, since nothing besides cdrdao itself supports those.

Reply 4 of 5, by dexvx

Posted on 2017-03-24, 07:05

dexvx Offline

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Nice thanks for the script. If the .toc is not needed, I suppose I can just add [rm -f "$1.toc"] to the end.

On a completely side note... is anyone having troubles FTP'ing large files to Windows 98SE on older systems? The standard MS ftp tool seems to work fine, but I'd prefer a GUI. I've tried the last Filezilla (2.2.16) for Win98SE, but it literally freezes the system on larger files (I'd say threshold is after 50MB) on my P2B/P3-600/3com-905B system.

Reply 5 of 5, by zerker

Posted on 2017-03-24, 20:18

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I haven't personally used FTP for transferring to old systems. SAMBA seems to work quite nicely to talk to any version of Windows (down to 3.11!) that I've used on my retro machine. I just set up a shared folder called 'public' that doesn't require authentication and can be used for transfers from my main Linux machine in either direction.

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