12 Jun
2024
12 Jun
'24
11:43 a.m.
On Tue, Jun 11, 2024 at 9:41 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
What would you suggest? My main point of reference is years and years of being in the
console video game scene, bin/cue is the most accessible of the high fidelity formats
I've seen for things, compared with say cdi and mdf/mds. Does a plain old iso
suffice for all relevant data from the media? Frankly I've never done dumps on a
UNIXy computer with an optical drive, only Windows boxen, so can't say I'm hip
to the sort of disc image you get doing a dd from an optical /dev entry, maybe I just need
to get a UNIX of some kind on my old beater game machine with an optical drive to do these
dumps going forward.
The vast majority of non-game software was distributed on discs that
were formatted with a single data track and no special formatting.
These can be safely imaged in flat (ISO) format. The main reason to
use the lower-level formats is for discs with disc-based copy
protection or multiple tracks (usually one data track and multiple
audio tracks), both of which are very uncommon for non-game software.
BeOS install CDs are the one exception I can think of; these have an
ISO-format boot track followed by one or two BFS-format system tracks
(separate system tracks are used for x86 and PPC), although even these
aren't actually dependent on multiple tracks and can be run from a CD
with just the system track if a boot floppy is used.
Most dumping programs should be able to show you how the discs are
formatted; if they only have a single track each, ISO format should be
sufficient.