I bought a plextor CD burner for exactly this purpose. Of course I needed to then buy a PCI IDE adapter, which was cheap and works fine. (It also has a SATA port with a newer controller than my motherboard that allows sata drives to be hot swapped out).

But the point is I have been able to successfully backup copy protected disks so I can preserve the original.

https://www.cnet.com/products/plextor-px-716a … e-drive/review/

squiggly wrote:

I bought a plextor CD burner for exactly this purpose. Of course I needed to then buy a PCI IDE adapter, which was cheap and works fine. (It also has a SATA port with a newer controller than my motherboard that allows sata drives to be hot swapped out).

But the point is I have been able to successfully backup copy protected disks so I can preserve the original.

https://www.cnet.com/products/plextor-px-716a … e-drive/review/

do you know of any other drives that meet the requirements?
also what program do you use imgbrn?

Apparently some Sony Opitarch drives are good, and certain Acer drives. Some are good at making disc images, some for burning. The key is accurate DPM measurements. Note that after around 2003 Starforce copy protection came into play and it is basically unbeatable.

There are a lot of forums with this info if you search, but the last posts are usually around 2007 🤣.

Arbys Guy wrote:

well i have a pretty big collection of pc games but I'm not a fan of using the legit discs in order to preserve them.
but when i burn games no matter what speed i choose the movies/cut scenes always glitch
i tried on the latest version of image burn on a recent dvd burner and an old cd r burner the dvd burn seemed to run alot better but both still sucked.

A lot of games are not even protected, and you can clone them just fine with any basic burning utility. Protected games may not run at all, but glitching cutscenes is not something that copy protection does.

So I'm very surprised that every single games you burn ends up with glitchy movies.

You tried different burners, but did you try different readers? Perhaps the optical drive you play these on has difficulties reading CD-R media. This often happens with old "tired" drives.

Which burning program you use doesn't really matter for quality, only for its ability (or lack thereof) to defeat copy protection. The data on the disks itself is digital so as far as the program can read it, it creates a 1:1 copy. Quality problems will be due to the disks or the drive.

For StarForce Disc (or any other similarly unbeatable means of copy protection, if they exist), you will need to combine the burned copy with a no-CD crack.

Burn slower, like 2x or 4x, and keep trying other media types. Don't use cheap stuff or label them before burning. BIN/CUE format will grab the whole disc. But I think CCD, SUB, IMG are supposed to copy the whole "nature of the disc."

I've had some old (1992-94) games that ImgBurn couldn't clone properly but CloneDVD can so there's the preference of software to watch out for.

dr_st wrote:

So I'm very surprised that every single games you burn ends up with glitchy movies.

i cant believe i didn't think of that, i will try another drive for reading the games its one of those tray less drives,and matches with some of my new stuff , on a side note, can anybody recommend a way to test/clean my drives?

I actually found a IBM DVD-RAM test disc unopened, with operating instructions, i dont know much about it, is there freeware now n days that is better?

and what other options do i have for my cd drives, ill do some googling in the meantime.

Auzner wrote:

Burn slower, like 2x or 4x, and keep trying other media types. Don't use cheap stuff or label them before burning. BIN/CUE format will grab the whole disc. But I think CCD, SUB, IMG are supposed to copy the whole "nature of the disc."

with my new drive i wrote at automatic write speed and 8x and 4x, with the old i did 4x the new drive did better on all burns, but i think the drive i wrote at 4x just really sucked,going to do all my old game writes at 4x from now on,
the media i have been buying is RiData(they sell it at a local pc shop in my city), i thought it was verbatim but that was my dvds... any other formats you would recommend? i also found an old unopened EMTEC BASF cd-r at a thrift shop i dont know much about them.

leileilol wrote:

I've had some old (1992-94) games that ImgBurn couldn't clone properly but CloneDVD can so there's the preference of software to watch out for.

i remember that program, do you burn games from new os and latest version on clone dvd?

I don't really burn games.

leileilol wrote:

I don't really burn games.

okay, well im curious how do you mount/emulate images?

well i think i am going to try differnt drives for reading tonight, and then just drive after drive of testing which work the best i have over 50 forsure 🤣, there is alot of LG, some sony, A-open , Samsung , lite on , ben q, phillips, mitsumi, afreey , acer, hp, asus ,and 2 Creative, not sure if they burn though.
most are just cd drives some dvd some burn some dont, ill prob try to use the ones that dont as drives in the computers i am going to use.

Maybe it is not the drives fault?

I copy and burn my stuff with a Software called CDBurnerXP: https://cdburnerxp.se/en/home
it is one of the best i and everyone i know uses.
But rather try burning on a slower speed to avoid these glitches you've talked about.