Games & Preservation

Backing Up PlayStation Games

The original PlayStation is the cheapest console to back up, because its games are ordinary CD-ROMs — the disc drive you may already own is the only hardware required. The work is in doing the rip properly and packaging it well: one modern .chd file per disc. The ground rules still lead: own it, rip it yourself, keep it private.

Media
CD-ROM — the famous black-bottomed discs (ordinary CDs underneath the dye).
Hardware
Any PC CD/DVD drive — internal or a ~$25 USB model.
Software
DiscImageCreator (rip) + MAME’s chdman (compress).
Output
.chd preferred; the OWL player also takes .pbp, .iso, .cue+.bin and .m3u.
Typical size
650 MB raw; usually 200–450 MB as a .chd.
BIOS
Not needed. The OWL player’s PlayStation core boots without console firmware.
An original Sony PlayStation console with controller
The Sony PlayStation. Its games are standard CD-ROMs — readable by any drive made in the last 25 years. Image: Evan-Amos, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

What You Need

  • A CD/DVD drive. Any working drive rips PS1 discs; a $25 external USB drive is fine. (Perfectionists chasing preservation-database-exact rips favor certain Plextor models, but that is a hobby refinement, not a requirement.)
  • DiscImageCreator — free, and the ripping tool used by the Redump preservation project. It reads every sector carefully, retries on scratches, and writes a .bin (the data) plus .cue (the track layout — many PS1 games carry audio tracks you don’t want to lose).
  • chdman — ships with MAME; a command-line tool that losslessly compresses the rip into a single tidy .chd file.

Ripping, Step by Step

PS1 CD-ROM (650 MB)1CD drive +DiscImageCreator→ Game.bin + Game.cue2chdmanlossless compress3.chd~350 MBOWL media libraryboots with no BIOS file — plays in the browser
The PlayStation rip: (1) the disc is an ordinary CD, (2) DiscImageCreator reads every track to a .bin/.cue pair, (3) chdman packs the pair into one losslessly compressed .chd. Diagram: NDEVR.
  1. Clean the disc — wipe from the center straight out to the edge with a soft cloth. Scratched discs usually still rip; the tool retries bad sectors.
  2. Rip with DiscImageCreator. One command reads the disc to Game.bin + Game.cue and reports read errors honestly. Keep the .cue — it is the map of the disc’s data and audio tracks.
  3. Verify. DiscImageCreator prints hashes you can check against the Redump database to confirm a bit-perfect rip of your pressing.
★

The black disc isn’t copy-protected data

PS1 discs authenticated themselves to the console with a wobble pressed into the disc’s lead-in — something a burner can’t reproduce — but the data is stored unencrypted, which is why a plain PC drive reads it freely and why a personal backup involves no circumvention of an access control. The black dye is just cosmetic.

Packaging: .bin/.cue → .chd

A raw rip is two files and 650 MB. The preservation community’s answer is CHD (“compressed hunks of data”) — a single file, losslessly compressed to roughly half the size, with the track layout embedded. One command does it:

chdman createcd -i Game.cue -o Game.chd

The conversion is reversible (chdman extractcd gives you back the exact .bin/.cue), so nothing is lost — .chd is simply the tidier archival container, and the format the OWL player loads fastest.

Multi-Disc Games

Final Fantasy VII ships on three discs; Metal Gear Solid on two. Rip each disc to its own .chd, then write a plain-text .m3u playlist naming them in order:

Final Fantasy VII (Disc 1).chd
Final Fantasy VII (Disc 2).chd
Final Fantasy VII (Disc 3).chd

Upload the discs and the playlist together; the player treats the .m3u as the game and handles disc-swapping at the prompts.

Playing Your Backup

Upload the .chd (or .m3u set) to your OWL media library: the Games collection recognizes it, and the PlayStation core boots it in the browser without any BIOS file — the usual emulator headache simply doesn’t apply. In-game memory-card saves and save states are managed by the player and synced across your devices, inside your own end-to-end encrypted storage.

(Saves on your original console’s physical memory cards are a separate, optional rescue — it needs niche reader hardware, and your backups play fine without it.)