Kinda fun to find myself putting together a list of resources like I’ve used in the past, as we gotta keep these methods alive as best we can.

For optical media, cds/DVDs/blurays/etc. it’s thankfully still pretty straightforward.

For music cds or data cds (PlayStation 1 games or the like) on Windows there’s the following for each respectively:

• ExactAudioCopy
• ImgBurn

For DVDs and blurays, it gets a little more complicated. In particular for blurays you’ll have to get a bluray drive, internal or external (external may be cheaper), and depending on if you’re also trying to handle ripping games, you have to look for a compatible drive or may have to flash the firmware on it.

On the plus side, once you have a bluray drive, if you didn’t have any disc drive at all, it may be good for DVDs and other optical media as well.

All this said, here’s some software to use:

• Handbrake video transcoder for adjusting video file formats, and also great for ripping DVDs with libdvdcss.
• MakeMKV another video transcoder, can be used for DVDs but given above, is mainly useful for bluray movies.

For cartridge/card-based media, it’s sort of hard mode depending on its age. For older game consoles in particular, you may need special hardware to dump their cartridges if you’d really like to do it yourself. However, many older games are already dumped so you can find them online and they’re often old enough the rights are in disarray and it’s unlikely anyone will hassle you over them.

More recent games from existing companies though, and you know the two in particular, they like to make it murkier. Nevertheless, the methods are usually similar:

• Jailbreak or otherwise exploit the console in question if it’s new enough for that (e.g. 3DS/Vita/Switch).
• Find the relevant homebrew software that enables dumping the games.
• Follow all the relevant instructions for the above, have storage with enough space for the dumped games, then enjoy playing them however you like.

Also a fun fact: in some cases a jailbroken console with backwards compatibility can then act as the specialized hardware for dumping other systems’ games (see Wii for ripping GameCube games and dumping GameBoy Advance games).

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This is a high level overview of some of the tools and resources I’m familiar with for these purposes, so this is by no means comprehensive. I encourage others that know of other tools and methods for this and other media^* to comment with their tools/resources.

*-Any LaserDisc rippers around? Vinyl? Video/audio/data cassette dumpers?