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While many companies discourage making "backups" or "archival" copies, if you want to <i>legally</i> play your games on an emulator you're going to need to dump them yourself. This guide covers the basics and more well-known methods, so there may be other methods not mentioned here.

==Cartridge-based (Up to 4th Gen)==

Games on Nintendo's NES, SNES, GB and N64, Sega's Master System and Mega Drive (aka Genesis), NEC's PC-Engine (aka TG-16), and other systems from the same era were stored on special cartridges to be read with a very particular pin layout only found on their intended hardware.

Special hardware dumping the cartridge contents to a more digital-friendly binary form has been made for older consoles. However, these pieces of hardware have been going out of print recently.

Newer systems using game cards such as the DS and 3DS have other solutions relying either on recent dedicated hardware, or homebrew under a compromised system.

Sometimes the companies re-release the games digitally, as a wrapper containing an emulator and the ROM. Depending on the company, the ROM may or may not be directly playable in regular emulators. You can extract those ROMs and play them without having to go to shady sites nor tracking expensive cartridges and potentially breaking them in the ripping process. And you get to support the company who made the stuff you love, instead of resellers hoarding second-hand game copies or random, less-reputable ROM sites other than those trusted by the community. That being said, emulated re-releases may contain changes due to licensing or censorship issues amongst other things.

[https://gist.github.com/Prof9/ed3d0e70d8f8a3116a5f5db29b54873d Here] is how to dump GBA images off Wii U's VC and unscramble the resulting ROM images to something playable on emulators.

* Sega Ages - MD

* Sega Mega Collection (multiple systems) - MD

==Sony PlayStation 1/2==

Windows: Use [https://ninite.com/ImgBurn/ ImgBurn]

While you can play PS1/PS2 discs directly from your PC's optical drive in some emulators (ePSXe and older mednafen releases for PS1, PCSX2 for PS2) it wears the disc and the optical drive the longer you use it, hence why it's not recommended.

# Put the PS1/PS2 disc into the disc drive.

# Open the title manager e.g. Multiman/Irisman and move the cursor to the game you just inserted.

# Then you'll get the ISO dump at the specified location.

Sony made the hard part of game ripping already for you, so why not go for those instead to dump your game images from?

==GameCube/Wii==

Only some out-of-print models of DVD drives may read GC and Wii discs, mainly from LG (compatibility list [https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-howto-dump-wii-or-gamecube-games-with-pc-no-wii-needed here]). Even then, Windows won't recognize the disc as valid. You'll need a tool like Rawdump or Friidump to dump it. Make sure you convert the dump to ISO format.

For the GC and Wii, use [http://wiibrew.org/wiki/CleanRip CleanRip].

Wii U discs have rounded edges making it impossible to read on Blu-Ray drives for PC the same way, though early dumping groups made a non-public physical modification to the Wii U to dump the data directly from its optical drive. If your console can run homebrew, however, you can dump your Wii U discs with [https://gbatemp.net/threads/dumpiine-v1-0-dump-your-rpx-and-rpl.398790/ Dumpiine], [https://gbatemp.net/threads/451736/ Wudump] or [https://wiiu.guide/disc2app disc2app]. Only Wudump produces a lossless dump, the others extract the bare code and data for the game in either RPX/RPL (Dumpiine) or WUPInstaller (disc2app) format.

To extract the ISO game image from a physical PSP UMD disc, you simply need a 6.60 CFW PSP, its USB connection cable, and a PC.

Now, if you "Initialize USB Connection" with your computer, what will appear under the freshly mounted drive in Windows isn't your memory stick, but a drive with a neat ISO file ripe for copying to your computer, which you can emulate or load in a CFW enabled PSP.

===With a PS Vita with HEN and NoNpDrm plugin===

'''Notice: dumping titles via Vitamin/MaidumpTools has been considered outdated methods as they are slow and always generate problematic or even upright broken dumps.'''

==Nintendo Switch==

Both cartridge and digital games, and related DLCs and updates could be easily dumped with [https://github.com/DarkMatterCore/nxdumptool nxdumptool].

Notice that you are very likely to be using emuNand in order to prevent from damaging the system software stored in the actual built-in storage and/or getting banned from eShop and other online services by Nintendo. If that is the case, you will have to create a new emuNand as the image of the built-in storage in order to dump game titles installed from eShop in actual built-in storage.

Despite the very kernel of them being just PCs, customized hardware and software copy protection made dumping arcade titles a very complex procedure that's not one-for-all.

[https://github.com/ArcadeHustle/RingEdge_NoKey_softmod Here] is an example of what it takes to dump and optionally change the games running in SEGA Ring series PC-based arcade hardware.

*[http://wiki.redump.org/index.php?title=Dumping_Guides Redump Dumping Guides]

===Converting PS1 ISOs to PSP Eboots===

Convert your own PS1 ISOs into Eboots using [http://pspslimhacks.com/psp-tutorials/converting-psone-games-to-psp-eboots-psx-to-psp/ PSX2PSP].

====Popsloader====

[[Category:FAQs]]