How & Why I Rip All Videogame Discs to a PC - Adam Koralik 

Backing up discs now will have a huge benefit later. That is we have a way of keeping those games that will be tied up in licensing purgatory, or delisted on digital storefronts. So if you can digitize your games and use ODEs, or Flash carts. You in theory could play your entire physical game collection for decades. Digital is another problem.

It's inevitable that Adam will be responsible for ripping every variant of every Shenmue ever and making backups of those.

Haven't been to this channel in a few years.. Man.. feels like night and day. Your personality and speech just feels so much more confident/powerful aha

I don't even understand why so many used games are so scratched. I have only ever scratched a game disc ONCE. And that one time was enough to scar me for life. :P Ever since that one time I've been insanely careful.

When I bought Sonic Adventure 2 for the Dreamcast, the game played perfectly until the end of the Hero Story. It would crash every single time. When I bought a second copy, it played fine. If you have the resources available to you, backing up your disc games is so important, even if it's just to validate them.

You have to give Adam credit for backing up his entire disc based collection as that must require a ton of effort. I bet the vast majority with extensive collections wouldn't even think about it, even though disc rot is eventually going to happen. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if more than 99% of those using optical drive emulators to play images simply download the Redump sets for convenience (myself included)

I am one of those weird guys who has HD DVD drive since I have one of those blu-ray / HD DVD player combo drives :)

For PS3, I recommend ripping the games on the console itself with custom firmware and a program called MultiMan, It can even rip PS1 and PS2 games (even on non-PS2 compatible PS3s).

Adam you do such thorough walk through of retro gameplay topics in a format thats pretty casual yet well organized and easy to listen to. Been watching since I was 15 in 2015!

Piracy is only when money is being made on selling Bootlegs. That time is long gone. No one is doing that anymore.

Not the historian we deserve, but the one we need.

Today I learned my Blu-ray drive can rip PS4 games I bought it specifically to rip PS3 games but never thought to try a PS4 game

I thought disc rot was a myth until I dug up some of my old PC games from the late 90's. A couple had black spots and one had deterioration around the outer edge. Luckily I've been migrating to ODEs for my consoles because dealing with worn disc drives is a huge pain. Optical discs were fine in their heyday but they haven't withstood the test of time.

Great stuff! Creating backups is the smartest thing you do to your games. You should do an episode on how to backup and extract games from Virtual Console, Mini consoles, PSOne (PS3) games, etc, and how to play them on original hardware.

Almost as if the hard Dreamcast process was trying to spite you even further with the video glitches at 20:22

Literally the most informative and entertaining video I’ve ever watched on this subject

I recently started ripping my collections because i was going to play an old ps2 favorite called justice league heroes and it would no longer read. Even after being resurfaced. So I've been backing my entire collection over the last week or so.

The Department of Defense needs to adopt the Dreamcasts way of preserving data

Keep up the content! I’m a new collector looking for ways to preserve my collection. This video was very informational. Thank you for this!

This was an excellent piece of content, thank you. Please consider adding time stamps as I find myself coming back to this video for reference and find it difficult to find the parts I’m searching for

Wow that's like one of your top videos you have ever made. Really interesting stuff. Thorough and helpful!

I need to get a disc drive. I'm a primarily pc gamer and I love emulators so not only would I be preserving my games but I would also be able to play my games on emulators without waiting for the games iso to download from Rom sites.

That CDRWIN screenshot, took me back, 12 yo me burning cdroms like a mad lad

WiiU is the ultimate way to play GameCube, Wii, and WiiU games

There should be a Mount Rushmore for the crypt keepers of gaming - there is the shining visage of Koralik, The Gaming Historian and... two further spots open ;)

I rip and back up all optical discs I have - even music CD's, movie DVD's, and blu-rays. The last two or three DVD's I bought, they each had defective sectors that I had to send back for a refund. And these otherwise mint condition DVD's aren't even that old! Maybe ten-twelve years, tops. Forget covid, *bit rot* is the real pandemic everyone should be worried about!

This is why I use emulation! All this hassle has been done for me. I just download the games and play them. So, they are not on original hardware, they are actually on far superior hardware! I love emulation! I have well over 10,000 games and productivity software (the productivity software is for my old computer emulators like the Amiga, the Atari St and BBC Micro etc.) 😁 Yes, I do buy games but only for the PC and nothing else. And consoles that I cannot emulate I couldn't care less for. Very interesting video. Thank Adam. I was wondering if the Dreamcast was really 1gb or it was just the disk fooling it that it was 1gb (you know like the fake 2tb $15 USB Thumb Drives you can get.)

I backup my whole library too, because I just don't trust this stuff to last as long as expect myself to remain interested in it.

Thanks for the Blu-ray drive recommendation! I'm almost ready to build my first PC and this will save me a tonne of headaches. I imported Another Century's Episode R when I was a teenager and always dreamed of an English translation patch (and with RPCS3 that's not impossible).

Absolutely love this video. The dreamcast was super difficult. I laugh everytime sometime tells me that burning dreamcast games is easy. If only they knew the process release teams go through to convert gdroms into CDIs. Its a nightmare sometimes. Dave Mirra freestyle bmx being a prime example since it uses a nonstandard CDDA format

I've done this with all of my PS1 games, PC games, saturn, dreamcast. I plan on doing it with my Xbox/PS2/Gamecube since I want to do the SD loader on some of the consoles and have backups.

With the impending closure of the PS3 Playstation Store im backing up my PS3 Blu-Ray Discs to a external hard drive with my CFW PS3 with Multiman that I installed back in 2019. It's not about piracy it's about preservation, people forget that even when the digital age started, a ton of games never got digital releases. Here are just a few examples of PS3 games without digital releases: Genji Days of the Blade, Heavenly Sword, Motorstorm, Motorstorm Pacific Rift, Katamari Forever, White Knight Chronicles 1 & 2, No More Heroes: Heroes Paradise, and so many more.

Dang, Adam is sitting on a MOTHERLOAD of clean game rips haha

I like turtles

Sweet! Good timing, after my ps3 super slim stopped reading discs, I started backing up all my discs for all my consoles. This was super helpful, thanks

I have a friend who got Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, and it would keep crashing at a rather peculiar scene without fail, despite the rest of the game running smooth as butter. Definitely worth backing these games up as a condition check

Thank you for this video, your dedication to Video Game preservation is awesome. Truly appreciate your knowledge

Big papa style preservation. I've got all gamecube and dreamcast and my favourite ps2 games backed up. Plus alot of ps3

Just started watching, but thank you for making this!! Have been looking forward to this. Really appreciate it, gonna start the arduous process of backing up my collection now.

“Lol here’s how u play burned games, don’t tell Nintendo” -every 12 year old kid Nintendo: WHAT U SAY?!

You can use DVD Decrypter for PS2 games. For ripping and burning.

I’ve been wondering how you rip your games and then this comes out a day later, many thanks lol.

I now know how to backup my turbo cd games. There is not a lot of current info on this. Thank you.

Great as always Adam

The LG drive is listed again. Ive had one for years, well before i was made aware that it worked for PS3/4 discs.

My favorite part of ripping game discs is seeing how the games are titled internally in the text document. Super Mario Strikers was just called "Mario Soccer" on the disc.

Old hardware for old games is the best advice for anyone wanting to rip games. I started backing up my PS1 collection on a Win7 pc with an external usb drive and was having constant errors but when I tried an old WinXP laptop with a much slower drive everything but the most scratched up discs worked fine.

its called Data hoarding.

It's strange. Kung Fu Panda on 360 is only on DVD and not available for download whatsoever. Dungeon Defenders and Castle Crashers are only downloadable. I personally find this very obscure. I recently finished buying/downloading all the games I want to have and putting them into my Game Drive which is a VisionTek Pocket SSD which dishes out 28MB/s on a USB 2.0 interface out of the Xbox 360's 35MB/s limit. What I am able to do is plug the Game Drive into the PC's USB and straight up copy the CONTENT folder which has the entirety of all my games, saves, Pro Logic 2 encoded MP3s, and even MPEG-4 Xvids+AC3 videos of my cat Lily.

Can't wait for the PS6 recap/retrospective on December 8,2033!

this was the most craziest insane nerd video i've ever seen!

Gonna recline n chill while listening. Good idea for a vid!

When I was younger(2005) I thought there was a device/cd burner that could rip PS2 games. In my head I wanted to rent as many games possible then copy them! Lets say a older smarter me achieved that greatness and more :D

Hey boss new to the channel as soon as you started talking i quickly realized this guy knows his shit. You remember the history and the systems that came before and it's technology. Your well rounded on your info keep up the great work pimpin.

I always back up all my game disks for all platforms first thing after buying and checking if they boot and play. For that very reason: to preserve them. The only exception is "PC Steam disks", just doesn't make much sence. Kudos for promiting the idea, and giving the insight to the less tech-savvy gamers!

seriously? all blu-ray drives wont read ps3 - ps4 games? when i built my pc in 2014 i got the lg WH14NS40 drive. lucky me I guess. recently backed my games up. went so easy.

I've always backed-up all of my games, started all the way back when the Nintendo Wii was stil relevant

Hell yeah Broadband club. Thank you so much dude for making this video the computer drives you listed are all I need now. Well that and the software. Cheers dude.

Great video as always Adam! Gosh, this brings back memories for sure. I also am one of the OG's from back then that backed up all their games.. CDRWin, CloneCD, Disc Juggler and Nero Burning ROM were some of my tools of the trade. I spent countless hours researching how to do this and that.. modded nearly all my consoles for the purpose of playing backups.. except for the PS4 (I know there is a firmware exploit for that one, but haven't gotten around to it) and well the Xbox One is still as of yet unexploitable. On a side note, for PlayStation 1 era games, I actually found a hardware based professional CD duplicator made by TASCAM that ripped PS1 games 1:1 to blank CD-R's. It worked near flawlessly (granted the original source disc was not too scratched up), and hence no computer was needed for those games. When I get home I may leave the model number of this TASCAM duplicator for reference. Just another option if anyone had acquired something like that. On the topic of scratched discs.. I remember how GameStop (EB Games in Canada) constantly tried to sell me their warranty on games.. Well guess what? I said no to that extra charge every time. To this day, all my games disc/cartridge still work, and are in immaculate condition. But yeah, I never understood how used games were always so bad.. I found discs from previous owners that were scratched up the wazoo and even spilled with pop drinks and gum... Seeing that kind of abuse to these discs just breaks my heart.

Not only modded console can be useful, which is a really good recommendation to digitalize any physical game that you got and put it on the SD card or Flash Drive. but i think they're might some people that they like to use on Emulator if people don't want necessarly needing a console, and just to buy the game legally and rip it to the computer to play it (depending on the disc they're supported for the systems). That could be also useful to digitalize some games that they don't really need a console but Games. could be maybe also useful. it's not the same feel to play it but atleast adapters exists for an original feel.

Very interesting video Adam!

The PS4 is the only 8th gen console that let's you rip discs to a PC.

I recently finished backing up my GameCube collection, thanks for all the knowledge from this video and in your channel, Adam. Video game stores and re-sellers should verify their products data like this and put it on their adds, I'd be willing to buy a game for a higher price if the seller can guarantee to me that the disc data is intact.

LG has a weird history of making optical media drives that "accidentally" read consoel disc media

I still have like 30 gigs I keep backing up on a bunch of hard drives of one of the original dreamcast archivers Mother Hen. It's crazy the progress made. I've still got a binder filled with sharpie marker CDRS n utopia boot discs from 2000. Oh my youth.

thats the best thing you can do

Been waiting for this...I want to rip my dreamcast games still. I got my original xbox, wii, and gc so far.

Great Video. Thank You for All The Info.

As an example of what adam is talking about. I had a copy of jet grind radio that i wanted to quickly playtest before gifting to a friend. This was a good idea because the game worked about 80% of the way through before i encountered a series of impossible to pass read errors. I got the disc resurfaced for a few dollars and had no problems after that put the point is still valid, DO NOT TRUST DISCS EVEN IF THEY LAUNCH.

The how will be interesting. The why is simple: disc based media has a bad habit of failing far more often than cartridge based media, or outright breaking. Preserve that which you have legally obtained.

The link for the ps3 drive doesn't seem to work for me..just defaults at Amazon's home page. What is the model of it?

Ahhh. I miss the old days. Cdrwin, clone cd, disk juggler. Nero for audio

Its also worth noting constant usage can burnout your console disc drives, my ps1 cd drive went bad recently, so if you can move to an ode format its beneficial for both your console and games. Secondly, slightly dipping into piracy, its very popular to condense game images in the "scene" this has caused a huge problem with dreamcast pirated games being broken or missing content. If youre using gdemu or redream youre better off ripping your original discs.

"this video will NOT show you how to..." (proceeds to explain general methods.) thanks for reminding me the headaches involved of backing up personal library.. more important to me is backing up digital exclusives that are no longer available for retail. so far i ripped my own unlock keys from my account and just have them sitting on a few hard drives with the games.

I very recently just started backing up my PS2 game collection using a Dell DW316 USB DVD Drive and Image Burn. 🎮💿📀

Oh man. And my dreamcast is the main reason i want to do this lol. I hope i will get around to it someday. Thank you for this video, it is very insightful.

i backed up all my ps2 games to play on my gaming pc emulator (also still own my ps2)playing at 4k wow what a difference

Thank you for making this video. I find myself returning to it rather often. I have a question regarding backing up Playstation 1 games, more specifically those PS1 games that are multi-track (i.e. where there are separate tracks on the disc from the data). When I rip the disks and check the hashes afterwards, I find that the first track, containing the data, is dumped correctly, but all the audio tracks get incorrect hashes. Is this something you have encountered, and if so do you know what the solution is? I am guessing it has something to do with "pregaps", whatever that is, but I don't know.

Is ripping a Pioneer LaserActive disc the same as ripping an Atari Jaguar CD disc.

Great video. Very informative.

If you wanna check a game you must rip it. Rip it good! Thanks especially for the ps4 info. Amazing tip about that bluray drive. I'm using a phat 360 drive with the power adapter. I've noticed it works well if you detect the drive in jungle flasher before ripping. This doesn't need to be done again until the computer is restarted.

I am wondering where to find mini 1,4 gb dvd -r to burn gamecube games on.. i cant seem to find those.. i am looking for 50 or 100 pck.. do you know where i can get it? Cause i’ve been looking for a while…. thanks

edge emulation has a bunch of ROMs for consoles that don't use too much space. The ROMs in that site are not much more than 1GB because it only goes up to CD/cartridge games, no GD/DVD. I got a few 32x games from there and play them on my Kega Fusion emulator so they're great, even DS games for those who have dsemume.

So i've been running into some issues with immaculate discs being unreadable for some reason on a couple of consoles - immensely frustrating. Does the Disc2app rip a disc that spits out a disc error on the normal wii u?

Do you know where I can get the crew in 4.0e ?software I have some Saturn games I want to verify works all the way thru.

The PS2 is so bizarre when it comes to ripping games. In my case, I wanted to try out the japanese version of Persona 3 on my european FreeMCBoot PS2. My initial thoughts were "well duh, it'll just run through the FreeMCBoot launcher. Like all other homebrewed consoles, it'll run imports of course!" But that's not the case, since, from my understanding, the PS2 drive is completely incapable of reading out of region PS2 games. My solution was taking the PS2 disc, ripping the disc on my modern Windows PC, then put the ISO on a hard drive, which is formatted for PS2, then put that hard drive into my PS2, and finally, run the game off that hard drive. So with the way the PS2 works, it seems like Sony would rather have you make copies of their games, than for you to just play imported games.

Thank you for helping me out with this helpful video. I just ordered the LG WH16NS40 Drive to rip my PS3 games, this will save me a lot of trouble considering someone gave me a free PS3 that has an issue with its blu ray drive. I also don't want to hack my main PS3 and risk getting banned from PSN. Update: a few of my PS3 games did not rip even though some were factory sealed. This proves why Adam rips his games in order to verify the integrity of the disc.

6:57 Can it convert multi-disk games into a single ISO? While ImgBurn and PSX2PSP usually gets the job done with such games on the PS1, Driver 2 is an exception in that when prompted to change to disc 2 it doesn't detect that you've swapped the disc.

Awesome, loved the vid! I’m actively trying to slowly stop using disks as much as possible lol

Hey Adam, this might be a really stupid question, but say someone wanted to port a PS2 or GameCube game to the Dreamcast, would it be as simple as ripping the game to a PC, then converting it to the Mil-CD Format and then burning it to a disc?

Congratulations on 112K subs

The readme file on rawdump shows four models of disc drives that work with wii & GC games. "Use a LG-8164b or LG-8163b or LG-8162b or LG-8161b dvd drive." I found the "LG-8161b" model for $30 AUD on ebay.

Lol the Dreamcast ain’t messing around. I didn’t expect such a long convoluted process. Never had one but it’s interesting to hear about.

Recently, we released a game for the Nintendo Switch; I showed it to my friend, he doesn't have a Switch but has been looking into emulators. Almost immediately he found our game's ROM had been ripped, this was a few months after release at most. So someone's already got that one figured out. It's quite a small game and didn't have a big physical release, so I'm guessing they downloaded it off the eShop and intercepted the network traffic, but I can't say for sure. Not disc-related, but still interesting I think.

Can't wait for PS5 unboxing!

I have some "forensic copying software" which I used to copy xbox one x official internal hdd to ssd, (it worked for that so would it work work these consoles)

I need your advice I have a ps4 console and ps5 console I want to rip my ps4 dvds to a portable drive so I can play the roms from the drive to my ps5 digital so I don't have to re buy them again. Is there a way to do this. Thanks William

AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW MAN I WANNA PIRATE ARRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!! I keed. Thanks for the info man, this was helpful. I just backed up my MGS3 disc which was suspect at best. I am amazed it actually read it.

I wanted to backup of my games into an ISO files because of DISC ROT. I have one on my PS2 has this problem and I would like to know how.

Hey Adam!!! I’m using a sata HD for my 360 externally but it seems to be stuffing up regularly so I’m looking at replacing it. I’ve heard u need HD’s that use AC power for them to be fully compatible with your jtag 360? Is this true? Or can you use a more modern HD that is just USB connectable with say a cord that delivers more power? As I could buy a big AC one but a small one would be better as it’s less space physically.