Making Sony Playstation Disc Backups

Note: At this place the PSXTUNE.COM -team want to say thank you to Tom who mailed us this text! We don't use mac's and have therefore no expirience!

As you can read above, this page has information about making backups on a Mac. Everything is explained, step-by-step. No more, "So, what format should I burn the CD in?" or, "How should I copy the tracks?" Nope, this 'FAQ' will leave no questions unanswered. (Hopefully.)

BIG COMMON QUESTION: "Does this mean I can now make an EXACT copy of my Playstation games?" NO. You still need to either 1) use the swap method, or 2) get your Playstation modded.

What you will need (all of them):
1) a desktop Mac (the faster the better)
2) at least 650 megs of free space on your HD (average Playstation game size)
3) a CD burner (we tested Yamaha CDR400)
4) Astarte's CD-Copy 2.0 application*
5) Adaptec's Toast 3.5.x application
6) some CDR material

* New information regarding the CD-Copy 2.0 demo off of Astarte's website: the new demo they put up after September 30th, 1997, no longer has 'Save' enabled. The previous demo before that date had 'Save' enabled. Some leads you can follow are: check DejaNews or the newsgroup alt.games.video.sony-playstation and ask/look around for someone that has the old demo or is willing to give you CD-Copy 2.0.

STEP ONE ASTARTE CD-COPY 2.0 Setup. You do not need to change any of the preferences for either CD-Copy or Toast. The only pref you will want to change is to make the buffer size in Toast as much as you have RAM for. If you have changed the prefs in either, pull the pref files out of your Preferences folder so both applications can create new, default ones. 1. Start up CD-Copy 2.0 2. Put your game into either your regular CD-ROM player or your burner and let CD-Copy read all the tracks (1 or more) 3. Check to make sure you have adequate space to copy the game 4a. If you get an error message like "Your backup will be 2 sectors longer than the original!, I wouldn't try copying it. I got a few of those errors and I haven't tried copying any of those games so I have no idea what may happen. You can try those later if you want, but don't say I told you they would work 4b. However, if you get an error message like "Some of the tracks do not conform to track-at-once recording", go ahead and click the 'Okay' button. Do not click the 'Adjust track gaps' button. We want to keep the format and spacing just like the original 5. Select/highlight all the tracks you see. If your data track has a menu arrow on the left side (the one's that you can flip to show the contents of a folder or something), don't flip it; leave it alone. Make sure you get all the tracks 6. With CD-Copy 1.x, you had to select 'One track' or 'Multiple tracks' when saving; you don't have to worry about that anymore with CD-Copy 2.0. Before saving, I usually make a new folder to put all the tracks into. Save the tracks into the new folder by selecting 'Save' from the File menu 7. Don't mosh around while your tracks are being read. In other words, make sure the CD reader isn't jarred while reading the tracks :) 8. When all the tracks are done being copied, check for any errors that CD-Copy might have spit out into the information window. If everything looks fine, quit out of the program and your game will be ejected automatically (unless you are running MacOS8, at which point your CD icon will show up on your desktop) 9. Check in the folder with the tracks. Make sure all the tracks are there and you have one data track that looks like a piece of paper with a mini CD on it and the word ISO in a block. The audio tracks (if there are any) will look like pieces of paper as their icons. You can also check the folder size is roughly the same size in megs as the game (they will not be exactly the same as differently formatted mediums will have different size sectors) 10. You are completely done with the CD-Copy part and your game is safely stored on your HD Making sure everything is working efficiently: 1. I don't want to go through all the networking situations and RAM conflicts and so forth so it's best to just start up your CD-burner now, if you didn't already use it to read your disc, and restart your Mac with only the extensions it needs for your type of burner 2. If possible, do not daisy chain your CD-burner

STEP TWO ADAPTEC TOAST 3.5 If you have Toast 3.5.x, we're on the same page. If not, try to get a hold of it, otherwise I can't guarantee these steps you should take. If you have 3.5.x, just follow these instructions and you're on your way to making as many backups as you want 1. Start up Toast 3.5.x 2a. Stick the CDR material to be burned in your burner 2b. Although I've never had any problems with any of my CDR material, I'll just say what everybody else says and say this, "Don't use cheap CDR material." (Whatever) In case you want to know, I use Memorex or TDK 3. You can choose either CD-ROM XA or ISO9660 for your recording format, but don't worry about it too much since Toast will choose "Disc Image" for you anyway (at least that's what I always get) 4. Open up the folder with all the tracks. Drag and drop the data track image/icon onto the Toast window. Notice that the description of the window is "Disc Image" and it gives information on how many megs the track is. If you don't have audio tracks, skip to step 9. Otherwise, keep going 5. If you have audio tracks, go to the Format menu and select 'Audio tracks' at the bottom of the menu. The Toast window will scroll to the right and will now include a button for audio 6. Drag and drop all of the audio track images/icons onto the Toast window. Notice that Toast will give you information on how many audio tracks there are and how long all of them are 7. Click on the 'Audio' button to open up the audio window. Make sure all the audio tracks are in order. If they are not in order, drag and drop them into order. Once done, click 'Done' 8. Now that we have our data set and our audio set, we can rest easy that all of _our_ work is done. It's now up to the CD burner 9. Click 'Write CD...' 10. Since I have no idea how fast your computer and burner are, set the write speed to whatever you want with the knowledge that the faster you write the greater the possibility of problems and skips. For the first burn, you may want to set the write speed to 1x (especially if your hard drive is fragmented). This is just so you don't set it to 4x or 6x, and then when your CD burner chokes and messes up your backup you think I gave you bogus instructions 11. Click 'Write disc...' and, again, no moshing. And a rule I follow, rather paranoidally, is don't use the blender, don't use your hairdryer, etc, etc, because you don't want any power surges or else you might end up with a two dollar drink coaster (or whatever you paid for your CDR material 12. When the copying is done, a window will prompt you that your CD is done and gives you an Eject button. Eject the disc and you're all finished 13. Enjoy your game