THthristian·Jul 10, 2024
It's really difficult. Unlike floppy disks, where you tell the drive to seek and get back raw magnetic pulses (so you can produce raw flux images), or hard disks where you tell the drive to read an arbitrary sector and get a blob of data (so you can produce sector-level images), the protocol for talking to a CD ROM involves asking for track/sector addresses, which means you have to trust the drive to interpret all the track metadata and error-correction for you - you generally can't just dump the "raw" data and do the interpretation yourself.
That's why the most robust CD image format is the BIN/CUE format. The BIN file contains all the sectors the drive allows us to read, the CUE file contains the disc metadata as interpreted for us by the drive firmware.
There are some drives which support extra "raw read" commands, but they're incredib
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ly rare and consequently in great demand by CD preservation projects like redump.org.
Some people have used the contents of BIN/CUE data to reconstruct what should actually be on the disk, but that's not quite the same thing. Here's a great explanation of the CD structure in all its complexity:
https://github.com/higan-emu/emulation-articles/tree/master/...