The cd drive gave up the ghost in my Model 2 a while back. It's all completely possible, but a decent amount of work. So this is at least a non-trivial hadware mod to the CD, then a new CD BIOS. That SD interface would need to be on the CD side, NOT in the cart. it's not a trivial task and two - making a fast enough SD card interface to make it worthwhile. The two main issues are: one - writing said BIOS. Well, if you have a method of replacing the CD BIOS (like a flash cart with that ability), you can write a BIOS that uses an SD card instead of the CD. That kind of effort is probably better spent on making more accurate emulators and FPGA recreations, but it would be a fun challenge for someone with the right skills and copious free time. In short it's probably feasible to create a somewhat automatic converter that will work for some precentage of games, but it would require a very large amount of highly technical work to create. An interesting way to go about that is to have someone play through the game in a modified emulator that traces the provenance of different types of data (though that can get rather complicated when compression gets involved). Sophisticated static analysis could probably get you part of the way there, but I suspect getting any kind of reasonable success rate would require some level of manual intervention. Additionally you need information about access patterns so you can intelligently split the code/data up into RAM sized chunks. You need knowledge about what data is graphics, what's sample data that would normally be read by the Z80 through the banking mechanism, etc. Generating a perfect disassembly is part of this, but not sufficient. Generally speaking, the problem is a matter of recovering deeper semantic information about the game. This includes the discs' directory structure, the boot code, and attributes attached to the files.Once upon a time I actually wanted to write such a converter so I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about what would be required to make such a thing work. In addition to the duplicated data from a physical disk, ISO files contain all necessary filesystem information from the original medium. The ISO standard the ISO files are based on is the ISO-9660 standard. Much more information is saved this way than simply copying files from one disc to another where important information like the disc header information can get lost. These copies can function as backup CDs since they do not differ from the originals regarding content. ISO files are used to create exact copies of CDs, DVDs, or other media saved on discs like a CD-ROM. The content of the ISO is an exact copy of the content of the original DVD or CD the disc image was created. ISO is the most common disc image format for both CD and DVD.
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January 2023
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