Hello. I am a student working on a project at an archives related to digital reproduction and emulation of video games. I am currently researching hardware necessary to digitally clone video games that are contained in the archives, and I came upon the Retrode because we have a large number of Sega Genesis games. First off, I'd like to say that I am incredibly excited that people are doing this kind of preservation work.
I poked around on the front page for a while and read the FAQs, but I couldn't find an answer to my question. While we'll probably be satisfied to make any kind of digital backup of the games, the ideal archival standard is to make a bitstream-level copy with a checksum to ensure that the ROM is, for all intents and purposes, identical to the game on the cartridge. I have worked with CDs and some legacy media (3.5" and 5.25" floppies, mostly) creating disk images using the disk dump (dd) command on Linux to achieve this. I was wondering whether the Retrode works using a similar function, and if so, if it generates similar checksum values/error checks the files to ensure that the copy is a clone.
Apologies if this information is somewhere, I couldn't find it.
Thanks a lot!