First post, by red_avatar
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- Oldbie
I have a bit of a problem. I started a project to rip all my Windows 9X and Windows XP games to CD images to save my CD/DVD drives from degrading too much. This seemed to work amazingly at first glance - Alcohol 120% defeats almost every copy protection - but I discovered that the CD images are not always reliable. A game would throw errors during installation or would crash due to corrupted files and this seems to stem from the CD image not being a perfect rip. Normally this is not a problem but to defeat copy protection, you HAVE to enable "ignore errors" and I believe this is where the problem stems from since it will not try multiple reads of a bad sector meaning I have CD images with data missing.
Anyway, after a lot of searching and thinking I realized this is simple impossible to avoid. Usually attempting a second CD rip fixes the problem but I'm never sure there isn't a new error in another area of the CD.
That made me think: the easiest solution here would be for some software to compare files of the CD image with the files on the CD itself byte per byte and check for differences.
The question is now: what tool would be ideal to use for this? Ideally it would be run in Windows 98 but since I store all images on USB sticks I could technically do it on a modern PC but that would mean using my external DVD drive (and I prefer not to use it too much since the new ones you can get are trash). Would a file checksum tool be suitable or reliable for this job?
Retro game fanatic.
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