While smell has been proven to be the biggest trigger of memories, doing that perfect combo in Tekken 3 with your fingers, listening to old school soundtracks or feasting your eyes on 240p pixelated graphics can induce a wave of nostalgia.

As a geek obsessed with both nostalgia and gaming, there is nothing more emotion-evoking than playing the good ol' games from the original PlayStation era, widely known as "PSX" because of its codename while it was in early development.

As a retro gamer myself who lives in a country in which console gaming is synonymous with the PlayStation, I’ve been playing a lot of late 1990s/early 2000s PSX titles lately, as I have the modern iteration of the console, the PS Classic that has an HDMI output. Then I had an idea: what if I ripped all my physical discs, which I’ve been safekeeping for over 20 years because I’m a sentimental maniac, to keep the original contents forever?

And that’s what I did. And to save you from trouble, I'll share with you how I did.

Enter the world of emulation.

How to rip your physical discs

Before we begin, warnings are in order: keep your hopes low. Compact discs are a fragile media format when it comes to long-term archiving. That’s why any retro gamer should make backups to safeguard the content.

PSX discs are covered with a black layer that was expected to eliminate piracy back in the day, and they are fragile after over 20 years of use. Disc rot is also real, which naturally happens on the surface around the 20-year mark, and unfortunately, I experienced this with some of my titles. Your storage conditions, room temperature and humidity also affect this process.

The vast majority of my humble 40ish-piece PSX game collection did work just fine. Some of them struggled to read and some others were not even detected by the PC. So, expect a few failures if you decide to rip your PSX discs. Without further ado, let’s take a look at the process.

First, you will need equipment to read the discs. If your notebook or desktop PC is not too old, chances are you will need an external DVD writer as modern computers usually do not have any. Normally, only a CD-ROM reader would suffice but it’s 2021, and external DVD writers are the only option.

Before starting the ripping process, make sure to clean your CDs properly to know for certain whether the disc is done for, or still alive. To clean the disc, dampen a soft cloth with water, or preferably rubbing alcohol, and start wiping. Start from the center and work your way outwards.

Then you will need a simple and free application called "ImgBurn." After downloading it from its official website and connecting the external DVD writer, run the app and wait for it to detect the disc. After it has properly detected the CD, click on "Create image file from disc." Choose the destination you want to export the disc image to and voila, let ImgBurn do the magic.

Even though the PC recognizes the disc and the process seems to be continuing just fine, some discs may have a section that is faulty, which can hinder the image creation process. If the process goes smoothly, congratulations.

But if the program fails to create the image, you will receive a notification that it failed. If you have properly cleaned the disc before inserting it and it still fails after a couple of tries on ImgBurn, just keep the CD as a physical memoir and forget about the content. It was sitting idle and rotting in your drawer for over 20 years and died a hero’s death. Get over it and move on.

After you have rescued all the images you could from your ailing discs, it is time to "time travel."

Let’s emulate

I know retro game purists say the proper way to enjoy retro games is to play on the original hardware connected to a CRT television. But physical media is bound by this simple term: shelf life. PSX discs from the mid-1990s or even early 2000s won’t tolerate day-to-day use after decades. So, to be able to keep your archives safe and sound for the longest time possible, digitization, and hence emulation, is the way to go.

So, let’s take a look at our options: