Games & Preservation

Backing Up Sega CD Games

The Sega CD (Mega-CD outside North America) bolted a CD-ROM drive onto the Genesis, and its games are ordinary CDs — so any PC disc drive backs them up, exactly like a PlayStation 1 disc. The one thing to get right is capturing the CD-audio tracks these games lean on so heavily. One .chd per disc holds it all. Start with the ground rules: own it, rip it yourself, keep it private.

Media
CD-ROM — a mixed-mode disc: one data track plus Red Book CD-audio tracks.
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 .cue+.bin, .iso and .m3u.
Typical size
100–600 MB per disc as a .chd.
BIOS
None to supply. The OWL player’s Sega CD core runs from your disc image.
A Sega CD (Model 1) attached beneath a Sega Genesis
The Sega CD — a CD-ROM add-on for the Genesis. Its discs are ordinary CDs any drive can read. Image: Evan-Amos, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

What You Need

  • A CD/DVD drive. Any working PC drive rips Sega CD discs; a $25 external USB drive is fine.
  • DiscImageCreator — the Redump project’s ripper. It captures the data track and every CD-audio track, and writes the .cue that keeps them in order.
  • chdman — from MAME; folds the whole mixed-mode rip into one .chd.

Data and Red Book Audio

Sega CD games were an early showcase for CD-quality music: much of a disc is Red Book audio — the same standard as a music CD — alongside a single data track. A backup is only complete if it keeps both. This is why you rip to .bin/.cue rather than a bare .iso: the .cue is the track list, and dropping it would mute the soundtrack. DiscImageCreator captures every track by default, so the safe path is simply to let it.

data + audio tracks1CD drive +DiscImageCreator→ Game.bin + Game.cue2chdmanlossless compress3.chdone fileOWL media libraryplays in the browser — no console needed
The Sega CD rip: (1) a mixed-mode disc of data and audio, (2) DiscImageCreator captures every track to a .bin/.cue pair, (3) chdman packs it into one .chd. Diagram: NDEVR.

Ripping, Step by Step

  1. Clean the disc — a soft radial wipe from center to edge.
  2. Rip with DiscImageCreator. It reads the data and audio tracks to Game.bin + Game.cue. Keep the .cue.
  3. Compress. chdman createcd -i Game.cue -o Game.chd gives you the single archival file.
  4. Verify. Compare your rip to Redump to confirm a clean read of your pressing.

Multi-Disc Games

A few Sega CD titles (Night Trap, some full-motion-video games) shipped on more than one disc. Rip each to its own .chd, list them in a plain-text .m3u in order, and upload the discs and the playlist together — the player treats the .m3u as one game.

Playing Your Backup

Upload the .chd (or .m3u set) to your OWL media library: it appears in the Games collection and the Sega CD core plays it in the browser — soundtrack and all — with save states synced across your devices inside your own end-to-end encrypted storage.