This guide will teach you how to copy the data from your physical game discs and make legal, digital disc image files for personal use on your computer. Although emulators often support physical discs, A. your discs will wear down quicker, B. the game will take longer to load, and C. the decomp project will not support physical discs. Make legal backups of your game discs!

What You Need

• An official, physical copy of the game “Legend of Dragoon” (4 discs)
• Software (such as IMGBurn) that can rip the disc data to your computer

Instructions

1. Download a disc-ripping software if you haven’t already. Then, run it.
2. Insert Legend of Dragoon (Disc 1) into an optical drive on your computer (CD-ROM drive, DVD drive, etc.).
3. Follow the software’s instructions on how to rip a disc image.
4. Compare your ripped disc image’s hash value to the official hashes on redump.org. You can check the hash of your file with this guide. On Redump, make sure you find and select the regional release pertaining to your copy of the game. If the hashes match, your disc image is perfect and shouldn’t throw any errors.
5. Repeat for the next three game discs.

Usually, emulators are looking for a specific file format (BIN/CUE pairs). If your software of choice is creating “.iso” files, that’s okay, it’s really easy to convert them. Just rename the .iso extension to .bin. Then, make cue files with this helpful tool from the maker of Duckstation.