12 Jun
2024
12 Jun
'24
1:01 p.m.
On 12/06/24 17:43, Andrew Warkentin wrote:
On Tue, Jun 11, 2024 at 9:41 PM segaloco via TUHS
<tuhs(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
FWIW, I've successfully dd'ed cds and cd-roms into iso files and burnt
copies. I've never made use of the bin/cue setup, and wouldn't know how
to work it.
Wesley Parish
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.