It is recommended by the PSIO creators that you rip your games using the Redump method (or use existing Redump rips… provided you already own a legitimate copy of the game of course).
Currently PSIO will only work with rips that have one .cue file and one .bin file, but a lot of games ripped using the Redump method have multiple .bin files. These are usually games that use CDDA audio where each audio track is stored as a separate .bin file. This means you will have at least two .bin files – one .bin for the game’s executable and one or more .bin file for each CDDA audio track.
A good example of this is the PAL version of Tomb Raider which has; “Tomb Raider (Europe) (Track 01).bin”, “Tomb Raider (Europe) (Track 02).bin”, “Tomb Raider (Europe) (Track 03).bin” …all the way up to; “Tomb Raider (Europe) (Track 57).bin”.
Oct 12, 2015 If you ever find yourself with an issue that after you ripped your CD Game (either a PS1 or PS2 CD game), you got a bunch of multiple BIN files instead of one. (see first image above) And if you required to have a single BIN file in order to either convert it to a VCD for POPStarter (PSX) or an ISO for OPL (PS2). Then follow the following steps. Bin is basicly other way to story.iso, and there are many tools from psp-era that will convert it. Psx2psp would be one of them. Also there are MULTIPLY bin2iso converters.
These rips will usually work fine on an emulator (or when burned to disc) as the program – with a little help from the .cue file – will “stitch” everything together on the fly. Unfortunately however PSIO does not support this.
So, what happens if your rip has more than one .bin file?
Well with this little guide you will soon be able to quickly and easily convert rips with multiple .bin files into rips with single .bin files – and best of all it won’t cost you a single penny!
Now I mentioned Tomb Raider above as a good example but for this tutorial I’m going to use Dino Crisis instead as I will be using that game in the next tutorial; patching a game to remove LibCrypt protection (coming soon!). The following steps are exactly the same for any game with multiple .bin files however…
First of all you will need some software. The software I’m going to be using is 100% free and legal – no hacks, no cracks and no nasty ‘activation’ programs that may or may not be viruses! You’re going to need the following:
1) Daemon Tools Lite – Whilst Daemon Tools is premium software they offer a free to use ‘lite’ version that has limited functionality compared to the premium version. For what we need it for though the free ‘lite’ version is absolutely fine (though of course do consider supporting the people that make this awesome piece of software by buying the premium version if you find it useful).
2) ImgBurn – This is a free, open source disc burning program. If you’re thinking you already have a different burning program so you may as well use that instead then think again – some other programs use different methods and will not yield correct results. Prime examples being Nero and Alcohol 120%. If you want to use a different program then fine but just be aware your mileage may vary.
Okay so now that you’ve downloaded and installed Daemon Tools Lite and ImgBurn it’s time to get started…
Fire up Daemon Tools and click on the ‘Quick Mount’ button on the bottom left of the window, then navigate to the directory containing your game rip and choose to mount the .cue file (NOT any of the .bin files).
Your image should now be mounted inside a virtual CD/DVD ROM drive (which should have been assigned a drive letter by Windows – note this letter down as we’ll need it in a minute) just as if you’d put an actual disc in an actual disc drive.
Once your image is mounted leave Dameon Tools running and open up ImgBurn. Select the option ‘Create image file from disk’.
Bin To Iso Linux
On the next screen change the source drop-down box to the drive containing your mounted image (denoted by the drive letter you noted down earlier) then select a destination for the output image in the next box down (I usually create a new folder on my desktop for this but you can put it anywhere you like it doesn’t really matter). You may also want to give the output file a more meaningful file name at this point too. In my example I’ve changed the name from the default “SLES_02207” to “Dino Crisis (Europe)” instead. I’ve also changed the “Read Speed” setting on the bottom right to 1x for better compatibility but this is optional.
Now hit the button to start the process (the disc icon with the blue arrow next to it at the bottom left of the window), sit back, relax and wait for the process to finish. On modest hardware this shouldn’t take more than a few minutes, and likely considerably less than that on most modern computers.
Once finished you should be presented with a window saying “Operation Successfully Completed!”.
Now if you look in your destination folder you should see a single .bin and .cue file. That’s it – you’re all done and if all went well PSIO should happily boot your game.
Continue to the next tutorial (coming soon!) to learn how to patch games that use LibCrypt protection to get them working with PSIO.
Update 6/3/2021: Google Search Console tells me this page is getting popular lately. While I originally wrote this with PSX games in mind, you can apply it to most other CD based consoles. I’ve also converted Sega CD, Sega Saturn and Turbo Duo CD games from BIN/CUE to CHD for use in RetroArch.
The Redump set for PlayStation 1 USA is about 385GB (just the games, no demo/samplers etc) 512GB in 7zip format; 7zip is not supported by the Beetle PSX core so when I originally added the PSX library to my Launchbox/RetroArch setup I just extracted every game. This took up a significant portion of the 1TB drive I was using to store all ROMs; additionally Redump uses separate BIN files for every track on the CD so a single game would have multiple BIN files plus the CUE. I found by accident an old Reddit post where I learned that you can compress BIN/CUE into Mame’s CHD format which is supported by the Beetle PSX core; the result is you will have a single compressed file for each PSX game that is comparable to the original 7zip in size and directly playable.
To do this conversion you need chdman.exe which can be found inside the MAME Official Windows Binary packages located here – mame0201b_64bit.exe was the latest release when I did the conversion.
Bin2iso
Extract chdman.exe from mame0201b_64bit.exe into the same folder as your PSX BIN/CUE files. Then you can just run one command to convert everything to CHD:
for%iin(*.cue)dochdmancreatecd -i'%i' -o'%~ni.chd' |
Expect this to run for a long time; on the Redump set, this conversion took about 1.5 days on an i7-4770K and a 2.5″ 1TB Seagate FireCuda hybrid drive. You should also have free space equal to at least 1.5x the size of the Redump set before running the command Just make sure you have plenty of free disk space as this process will create new CHD files in addition to all the BIN/CUE files.