Backing up CD-ROM games [Media preservation series] • OLD SCHOOL by Harri Kauhanen

If preserving MS-DOS floppy games was easy, you may have little harder times with some CD-ROM games. During CD-ROM era, game developers started to give less importance on the game box, manuals, “feelies” and used less often a copy protection based on the material you can find in the box. Since the late 1990s copy protection was mostly handled by making the media hard-to-copy and requiring the disc inserted when playing the game. Some of the copy protection schemes created are listed here.

Copy protection schemes do not usually stop us making backups and burn playable copies of the media. More advanced protection schemes, however, might require running the game from a specially mounted image (simulating a CD-ROM drive) or using some kind of daemon process to make copied disk look “original enough” for the game.

Basically, you need:

A suitable CD-ROM/DVD (burner) drive (keywords: RAW DAO SAO TAO SUB SHEEP-2)
UltraISO or any other CD-ripper supporting ISO and BIN/CUE formats
Alcohol 120% for copy protected games

WARNING: Alcohol 120% “Free Edition” (no matter how you customize the installation) will install malware to your computer (some of that you cannot remove even with Malwarebytes Anti-Malware).

What is a “suitable drive/burner” is not clear to me, but is looks like the drives from the past (pre-2005 at least) had very different capabilities of reading/writing media.

You may also find tools like PROTECTiON iD and Alcoholer useful, but they are not absolutely necessary as Alcohol 120% does a decent job digging the same information for you. A good overview of the whole process(and even more tools) you can find at GameCopyWorld.

What file format to use the images? For preservation purposes, it’s wise to choose the most supported format you can use.

Games that are not copy protected I save as a standard .ISO (raw) file (any burner will accept the format).
Games using mixed mode should not be saved as “.ISO”, but very popular .BIN / .cue format preserves data and audio tracks correctly. The metadata from CUE-file is needed to burn the raw data from BIN-file.
For copy protected games I use the .MDS / .MDF format of Alcohol 120%. MDF-format is “multilayer raw” and MDS-file contains metadata about the disk and copy protection.

DOSBox supports mounting of ISO- and BIN/CUE-images, but it cannot mount Alcohol 120% formats (DOS games are usually not protected using CD-ROM based protection). Copy protected (Windows) games usually need Alcohol 120% providing a proper “emulation” for games trying to use copy protection routines (you can either use the image files or burned media).

When preserving a copy protected game CD, you need to be careful to use correct settings both when imaging and burning the CD. Use “Data-Type Analyzer” (on Alcohol 120%) or the mentioned tools for getting the settings right. Also, make sure you have Alcohol 120% configured using Emulation for games that need it (Ignore media type and RMPS might be needed). An alternative to CD-drive emulation is to try to find a “No-CD” patch for your game.

Unfortunately, it looks like it might no be possible preserve all CD-ROM games such way that you could simply burn 1-to-1 copy game media that works every time. MS-DOS games and older Windows games are often distributed with unprotected media, and some (older) protection schemes do not stop us making 100% accurate backups. For copy protected games your best wish is that the original media will stand the time - and if not, a helper software might be needed to run the game. The situation is even a bit harder for game console owners as a hardware mod is needed to get the “emulation” software to accept your backup copy.

If you found this post interesting, you might also be interested in other parts of the Media preservation series.