Ripping Gamecube games for dolphin emulator

[Jonnythm]

I recently decided to experiment with a bit of gaming on linux, and I was wondering if it were possible to rip my gamecube games from their CDs and then use the to play games using dolphin emulator. After a bit of googling I found that there are many people who claim to have done it on Windows. So in the interest of finding out how to rip an .iso file from the disk I simply plopped it into my DVD drive to see what would pop up. When nothing happened I checked in the /media folder and found that nothing had happened, and the disk wouldn't mount.

Any clue what the problem might be or how I might copy my disks to my computer?

I did a bit of research and I believe what I'm doing is legal since I own the disks, and I'm allowed to make backups for my own use.

[Prime624]

Go to coolrom.com. Basically rips it for you. Has many ROMs of most older consoles including GameCube. Most people use it to get ROMs of games they don't own (which is illegal), but if you own the games, it's perfectly legal. That's why the site doesn't get shut down.

[Jonnythm]

Go to coolrom.com. Basically rips it for you. Has many ROMs of most older consoles including GameCube. Most people use it to get ROMs of games they don't own (which is illegal), but if you own the games, it's perfectly legal. That's why the site doesn't get shut down.

That's downloading them though. Not sure if my university would be cool with that, even if it is legal.

[Modplanman]

There is no exception - at least for US and UK law - that says downloading ROM's is legal if you already have a copy of the game. Technically ripping and playing them on an emulator may be illegal too.

On topic - You need a particular model of disc drive to be able to rip GC games, as the disc and way data is recorded on it for GC games does not play well with most generic CD/DVD drives. See the Dolphin Wiki page for info, including drives that will work:

https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.p...ing_Game_Discs

You then need Friidump, which is apparently free software. There's an unofficially updated version I just found here:

http://forum.redump.org/topic/8108/f...e-linux-build/

No idea if it'll work.

[cariboo]

Moved to Emulators.

[Ranko Kohime]

My experience, both with GameCube and Xbox 360 games, is that they are non-standard formats, and so aren't read properly, (Xbox) or at all (GameCube).

However, not having tried within the last two years to do rips, I can't give current experiences, merely past ones.

I believe GC rips were done with a network card for an actual GC console, with special firmware loaded on the console.

[LillyDragon]

Yeah, the Gamecube uses a non-standard format that most drives can't read, and if you're interested in chipping an original Gamecube, also makes running backup copies extremely difficult, because not too many mini-DVDs use that partition format. (I think some guys in the modding scene found only one brand of discs that the GC could read reliably without reading errors.) It's such a huge hassle that it's not even worth it, so you're better off playing backups on the PC through Dolphin, if you can find the right DVD drive to rip them for you.

There is no exception - at least for US and UK law - that says downloading ROM's is legal if you already have a copy of the game. Technically ripping and playing them on an emulator may be illegal too.

It is perfectly fine to rip them yourself in the US, because they are your rips of your own copy of the game, and CD or DVD backups are protected by the same logic. (Although the weird thing for video games is that the backup must not be copied to the original media. As in not CD to CD, more like CD to an SD card or hard drive. Flash carts for cartridge media negate this by having the games themselves stored on an SD cart separate from the cart.) Even though it's also readily available on the Internet doesn't make it right to download it, because that's someone else's copy of the software.

I guess CD key analogies apply here. No one can stop you from making backups of your computer software, but it can be questionable to use someone else's registration key besides your own, unless the license key was transferred specifically to you.

[Jonnythm]

Alright thank you all for the help.