How to dump your own games for PC ports and recomps
Nearly every port on FanGamesDB comes with the same line in its README: supply your own copy of the game. The projects ship their code and nothing else, so the levels, textures, music and voices have to come from a disc or cartridge you own. Getting them out is called dumping. For some consoles it takes five minutes with the PC you already have. For others you need a modded console or a cartridge reader.
Before you start: read the project's README
Ports are picky. Many accept one region and one revision of the game and check the file's hash before they start.
Crash Team Racing: High Octane wants the US disc saved as
ctr-u.bin. Syphon Filter PC only takes the North American 1.1
release. OpenCE is relaxed and accepts any version of Halo. Check
which file the project wants before you buy a second-hand copy to dump.
Is this legal?
It depends on where you live, and we're not lawyers. Many countries allow a private backup of something you bought, but also ban breaking copy protection, and for console discs those two rules collide. Cartridge games and PC games mostly don't have that problem. Whatever the law says about your dump, sharing it is a different matter: keep it to yourself.
PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2
These are the easy ones. Any CD or DVD drive in a PC reads them. The preservation community uses
Media Preservation Frontend (MPF), which drives a dumping
program and names the files the way Redump does. PS1 games come out as
.bin and .cue files; keep all of them together, because games with CD audio have one
.bin per track. PS2 games come out as a single .iso. For a quick dump of a PS2 DVD,
ImgBurn's "create image file from disc" also works.
Ports that use these: the PS1 recompilations, plus ProjectCane for Sly Cooper on PS2.
GameCube and Wii
PC drives can't read Nintendo's discs. The usual tool is CleanRip,
which runs on a Wii through the Homebrew Channel and writes GameCube and Wii discs to an SD card or USB drive as
.iso files. Ports such as Dusklight (Twilight Princess)
and Super Mario Strikers start from a dump like this.
Original Xbox and Xbox 360
Microsoft's discs are the awkward ones. A normal PC drive can't read them; only a few old DVD drives running Kreon
firmware can. Most people use a modded console instead. A softmodded original Xbox copies the disc to its hard drive, and
you then pull the files off over FTP. extract-xiso
packs a folder of Xbox files into an .xiso image and extracts images too, which is what OpenCE asks for.
Xbox 360 recompilations usually want the game's files rather than a disc image: the default.xex program and
its data folders. A 360 with a hacked bootloader (RGH or JTAG) copies discs to its hard drive, and Xbox Live Arcade games
you bought are already there. Each project's README says which files it needs. Our
Xbox 360 recomp guide lists the projects.
N64, SNES, Mega Drive and other cartridges
Cartridges need a USB reader. Three common choices:
- sanni's Cart Reader: open-source hardware that reads N64, SNES, Mega Drive, Game Boy and many more. You can build it yourself or buy one assembled.
- Retrode 2: SNES and Mega Drive out of the box, other systems through plug-in adapters.
- Epilogue's GB Operator: Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance, with its own app.
N64 recompilations are fussy about the file format. Most want a big-endian .z64 file and check its hash.
If your reader saves .n64 or .v64, convert it rather than renaming it: the byte order is
different, as well as the extension.
Nintendo DS and 3DS
A 3DS running custom firmware and GodMode9 dumps both DS and 3DS cartridges to its SD card. That covers ports like ctw-native (GTA: Chinatown Wars) and TriAevum (Ocarina of Time 3D).
PC games
Nothing to dump. Source ports like OpenRCT2, Fallout Community Edition and DevilutionX read the data files from a normal install, including the Steam and GOG versions. The project's README names the files to copy.
Check the dump
A bad dump is the most common reason a port refuses to start or crashes later. Compare your file's checksum with the
known-good one: Redump lists discs and
No-Intro lists cartridges. On Windows,
certutil -hashfile game.z64 SHA1 prints the SHA-1; on Linux and macOS, use sha1sum or
shasum. If the project's README gives a hash, that one is what counts.
Once the file checks out, find your game on the full list and follow the project's own instructions.