Redump Forum

I have to agree with F1ReB4LL on this.
When you are dumping/doing preservation work, you should not be hacking things to compliance or to "intended" values, even if that feels convenient and/or reduces number of dumps. You are supposed to be documenting the disc itself (not just the data that is on a disc). Nothing more, no less. If the disc is crap, you have to document a crap disc, not make it look nice and proper.

In my opinion, any other approaches would be exactly the same big NO-NO like an archaeologist discarding a fragment of bone or pottery because he has already thousands of very very similar fragments. Or to correct a grammatical error in an ancient script because what was actually written and what was intended to be written were not the same.

I agree that this approach may feel counter intuitive to the layman and that it is even pointless from a gamer's or rom collector's point of view. However, preservation is just coincidentally useful to these categories and should not be going out of its' way to cater for such needs. Documenting discs is the point here. At least that's how I understand the project.

Redump already modifies data by not using rawdump. We're organizing data in a useful way. Fixing bad mastering falls in line with that. Just note and offer patches for the bad parts.

Regarding sensitivety of the data: that's a valid concern, but only for recent discs. And the data should still be stored, but kept private for a while.

I don't think the rawdump comparison is valid. Redump dumping methods are "natural"/replicable ways of interpreting the data - not something that is done manually to fix something that is seen as mistake.

Redump already modifies data by not using rawdump

The best way to preserve the disc is to scan it with microsocope. Period

Just to be clear:

The discs that prompted me to post this thread are not bad burns. They intentionally have a file with a random number in it. That is, each disc was technically a custom one-off burn created by a DVD-burning station, probably with a robot disc changer so the publisher could make a stack of a few hundred quickly.

They are also not otherwise identical to the release version of the game. Some of them are from months before the release build, and others have debug functionality enabled.

In other words, even without making other assumptions, these are very unique versions of the games. There were likely never versions of these discs made that didn't each have a unique ID file.

user7, I have a few like that as well, however, I err on the side of submitting them because of the somewhat-recent discovery that some PS2 master discs had prototype data used as disc padding. That is, even if the game data looks virtually identical, there may be something unusual that's not visible in the filesystem.