I fell down a PlayStation rabbit hole, starting with Standard Issue Computing’s recent posts on the PS2 and how the media reported on it in the late 90s, which lead me to the three main disc types that the PS2 could read (above):
- Blue – PS2 games that came on CD-ROM
- Silver – PS2 games that came on DVD-ROM
- Black – games designed for the PS1
I wondered if there was more about these topics online and soon found that Google wasn’t much help so tried Marginalia which directed me in a slightly different direction. Joshua D. Boyd wrote an article in 2023 about ripping PS2 discs and how he did it with Linux. It involved using a few tools:
dd– a shell command for reading, writing and converting file data)cdrdao– stands for CD recorder disc-at-once which is an open-source application ripping and burning CD-ROMsddrescue– a data recovery tool
I got an external disc drive for Christmas last year to rip game discs and I have a few PS2 games so this came in handy, even if it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. That’s the power of niche search engines and bloggers being helpful.