This news actually broke back in May, but it's a great piece of preservation news we wanted to share with you: it's now possible to legally dump Xbox, Xbox 360, GameCube and Wii games from a PC, with no modded console or shady workaround involved. The key to all this? A custom firmware called OmniDrive, flashed onto certain off-the-shelf Blu-ray drives.

A firmware that changes everything

Until now, dumping Xbox, Xbox 360, GameCube or Wii games almost always meant going through a modded console, with all the hardware and legal constraints that come with it. OmniDrive flips the problem on its head: instead of modifying the console, it's the optical drive that gets modified. The firmware specifically targets Blu-ray drives built around the MediaTek MT1959 chipset, manufactured by Hitachi-LG Data Storage, and lets them read the proprietary formats of these consoles.

Released out of beta back in February, the project really gained visibility recently thanks to a video from YouTuber Archades Games, who walked through the whole installation process as well as the extraction of an Xbox 360 game using Media Preservation Frontend, an open-source dumping tool.

Which drives and which consoles are supported

We're not talking about just any Blu-ray drive here: compatibility is limited to specific models, mainly from LG (the WP50NB40 comes up often as a reference), Asus, Buffalo and Verbatim. OmniDrive offers two versions of the firmware, one for standard internal drives and one for external/slim models.

On the console side, GameCube, Wii, original Xbox and Xbox 360 are the big winners of this compatibility, with decrypted dumps that are directly usable in emulation. Dreamcast is also supported, but only for the low-density area of the GD-ROM. The firmware can also read PS3, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series and Wii U discs, but these remain encrypted: they can be extracted, but not used as-is for now.

How to check if your drive is compatible

The Disc Preservation Project Wiki keeps an up-to-date list of compatible drive model numbers, with quite a few models listed. For anyone in a hurry, the simplest trick is to launch MakeMKV, the well-known DVD and Blu-ray backup app: the chipset name and drive model show up directly on the home screen, letting you check compatibility in a few seconds.

Preservation gains ground

This is a notable step forward for video game preservation: until now, dumping these console generations required complex manipulations, aging (and increasingly fragile) hardware, or outright a modded console. Being able to rely on an off-the-shelf Blu-ray drive, with open firmware and an active community behind it, makes the process much more accessible to anyone looking to back up their own physical collection.

Sources: RetroDodo, TechSpot, Tom's Hardware, XDA Developers, HotHardware, Time Extension