Ripping Games

Ripping disc with computer

If you're lucky enough to have a supported optical drive, you may be able to rip game ISOs with Rawdump. See the forum thread for the list of known drives and instructions.

Ripping disc from Wii or Wii U

You'll more likely need to rip the disc using homebrew software on a Wii or Wii U in Wii mode. See Homebrew Channel for instructions on how to use it.

CleanRip

CleanRip can rip a game disc to SD or USB. Note that CleanRip may be configured to split the ripped disc file into several pieces to fit the FAT, FAT16, or FAT32 formatted SD or USB devices. These file systems have a max file size of 4 GiB (Gigabyte). You may need to put together the pieces of the ripped ISO yourself, or else Dolphin will not run it (or will just boot to a black screen). Also note that GameCube discs will not have this potential issue because the max size is only 1.36 GiB.

To avoid assembling the pieces of the ISO yourself, it is recommended you rip the discs (especially Wii game discs) to a USB external NTFS formatted storage device (as Wii cannot read NTFS formatted SD cards). NTFS has a theoretical max file size of 16 EiB (Exabyte), or 1,048,576 GiB. CleanRip is not auto-configured to write a file with more than 4 GiB in file size. At the Wii Disc Ripper Setup screen, set Chunk Size to Max, and New device per chunk to No.

Certain Wii discs are dual layer (or DVD9) instead of single layer (or DVD5). CleanRip will also need to be configured to read and rip those kinds of discs. At the Wii Disc Ripper Setup screen, set Dual Layer to Yes. The rip will take roughly double the time than usual Wii discs of 4.38 GiB as the dual layer ISOs are 7.93 GiB in size.

USB Loader GX method

This assumes you are using the latest version of USB Loader GX with certain cIOS (such as d2x-cios) installed on your Wii or Wii U in Wii mode. Your Wii may also be able to rip GameCube as long as your Wii supports it with DIOS MIOS installed. Wii Us and Wiis sold after late 2011 lack the GameCube controller and memory card ports, and can make no use of DIOS MIOS. You can rip your game disc by just launching USB Loader GX and then insert a game disc, it will ask you two options: Install or Mount DVD drive - You'll want to choose "Install". It will begin ripping process to your storage device as...

• For Wii: X:\wbfs\GAMEID_*\GAMEID.wbfs (and GAMEID.wbf1 as continuation file, if source is over 4,194,272 KiB)
  • Dolphin build version 3.5 and later can accept Wii games in WBFS format.
• For GameCube: X:\games\* [GAMEID]\game.iso (NOTE: file system must be FAT32)