Making ISOs Out of Old Game CDs

First of all, I want to point out - I'm not sure about the legality of this.  I happen to own some old games.  Not sure how long they will last on CDs.  I have kids and I can't tell you how many CDs/DVDs they have destroyed.  I want to save them because I happen to like playing older games, so I'm converting them from CDs to ISOs for my use only.  I'm not distributing them.

If you have a Mac, you can use Disk Utility to convert the CDs to .cdr files.  If the games are made for other devices, you will have to convert those .cdr files to .isos.  I didn't have much luck converting the .cdr files to .isos with the hdiutil command.  The isowas fine for my Mac, but for some reason, it would not open on Windows devices.  The Windows devices kept popping up a message that said, "corrupt iso image".  That command is:

hdiutil convert <game>.cdr -format -UDTO -o <game>.iso

Maybe others will have better luck?

So, I turned to Ubuntu.  There's a nice command on there called, "mkisofs".  The biggest hurdle I had with this was finding a CD-Rom drive my Ubuntu machine would read.  Other than that, it went without a hitch.  dd could also be used, but it wasn't good for this case because you have to unmount the device to create an image from it.  I'm using an external drive.  

The dd command is:

dd of=<directory/of/cd/rom> if=<output/directory/andfile.iso>

Ubuntu auto mounts it.  Yes, I know, umount, then run dd...

With mkisofs, you don't have to unmount the drive.

The exact command I used was:

mkisofs -lJR -o <gamename.iso> <directoryname>

That's a lower-case L by the way, not a upper-case I.

You can specify multiple directories.  Just make sure that for a game for instance, that it has the same directory structure that the installer expects.  Another issue you may come across is copyright protections.  Sometimes this won't work because of that.  Fortunately, for many of my games, I didn't have an issue.

Another interesting thing to note:  I could copy the CD directory structure, without making an iso.  I had to doctor the multiple cds into one to fit the directory structure that the installer was expecting, but that worked as well, without making an iso.

I did have an issue with game compatibility.  I found directions about how to fix it, so it runs fine now.  Nothing wrong with the iso, just wasn't made to be ran on newer OSs.