Some Questions About BIN/CUE Files and ISO Files...

[John Enigma]

I asked this question in the romhacking Subreddit (yes, I have a Reddit account), but I only got one comment. I was thinking it be nice if I asked here.

1. Why is it that when I download a PlayStation or Saturn game, it sometimes come with a CUE and SO MANY BIN's that are classified as "Tracks" like a music album?

2. Why do those games come in BIN/CUE files and not ISO images? (A little misleading, don't you think?)

3. Why do these games sometimes come in different files that are NOT BIN/CUE or ISO files?

4. Since the majority of the games come in BIN and CUE files (in my case, it sometimes comes with a lot of "Track" BIN's), what is the best tool for converting these files into a single ISO file? Also, which do I convert first: the BIN file, or the CUE file?

Hopefully, I get some answers.

[FAST6191]

If you are mainly getting bin and cue in this then be thankful -- the PS1 era was a time of dozens of different competing formats and the result was a mess.

1. Probably because there are music tracks. Both systems quite notably featured CD drives and that allowed for streaming full quality CD music.

2. Bin/cue? Who cares. Imgburn burns it, emulators should support it and virtual drives should also.

3. Because the PS1 was a time when there were dozens of companies writing image burning tools and having your own format for disc images was a nice way to lock people in, and the Scene did not really have any standards. Sometimes some standards did better than others -- clonecd worked in a lot of cases where nero image might have failed for PS1 games.

4. Why do you want to convert? Not sure what tools we are suggesting these days if imgburn will not do it, though the likes of poweriso, magiciso, ultraiso and possibly winiso tend to be the suggested tools. They are commercial though so be aware of that.

[John Enigma]

...

4. Why do you want to convert? Not sure what tools we are suggesting these days if imgburn will not do it, though the likes of poweriso, magiciso, ultraiso and possibly winiso tend to be the suggested tools. They are commercial though so be aware of that.

I ask this because I downloaded the latest version of ePSXe, and inside the isos folder I have a lot of BIN's and CUE's of games all cluttered up.

People say that IMGBurn is the best tool for converting BIN's and CUE's into ISO images. That part I get it. But the better question is which part I convert into an ISO? The BIN or CUE?

People who have made PS1/Saturn/GC/Wii hacks, or has ripped image files from discs should know this.

[Axiphel]

Epsxe doesn't need strictly isos as it can run tons of different formats. Bin+ue is the standard for PSX now because of Redump.

[John Enigma]

^Still, the BIN files and CUE files are starting to take a lot of space on my PC.^

I really need to know which file do I convert in a single ISO, when I get IMGBurn: BIN or CUE?

[FAST6191]

Bin is the data, cue tells the iso handling program what it is.

Also barring all the fun MP3 conversions (if you think iso handling is a pain in the arse now then wait until you start trying to use audio converted isos on different systems) then how would iso take less space? Most PS1 games not not benefit the most from minor compression. If "clutter" is a thing then take the ultra advanced super haxxor step of making a directory for each game or using a launcher frontend.

Short version. As long as you are not suffering with disc juggler, cdrwin, clonecd, nrg on top of the plain iso and bin/cue then stick with bin/cue and iso. bin/cue is probably second only to iso, and iso even has its own little extra files now for certain things (see all those .dvd things that come with 360 games).

[NERV Agent]

Admittedly, I don't know much about these pirated ISOs with a bunch of files for tracks, as I usually own the PSX games I want to hack and rip the ISOs myself.

If all those files bother you that much, I have an idea, although it might be somewhat of a hassle.

Burn the pirated ISO (along with all the track files) to a blank CD-R disc and load it into your computer. Or, load the pirated ISO into a virtual drive like Virtual CloneDrive.

Get CloneCD and follow the instructions on how to rip the ISO here:

http://ngemu.com/threads/how-to-make-a-perfect-backup-of-psx-games.34515/

(If using my Virtual CloneDrive idea, insert the "PSX disc" in your virtual drive instead of your burner.)

You should get an ISO with all the tracks in one image.

[Bregalad]

2. Why do those games come in BIN/CUE files and not ISO images? (A little misleading, don't you think?)

Because games sometimes uses mode 2 sectors where correction data is used as actual data - for their FMVs most notably or for streamed audio music in XA format. Using simple ISO format would only rip the first 2048 bytes of the sector as if it was mode 1 and discard the rest, which would not work.

[paul_met]

2. Why do those games come in BIN/CUE files and not ISO images? (A little misleading, don't you think?)

The game may contain cdda tracks that will be lost if you save a CD image into ISO format.

3. Why do these games sometimes come in different files that are NOT BIN/CUE or ISO files?

Different programs may offer its own format of CD images (Nero - nrg, Alcohol - mdf / mds, Discjuggler - cdi ...)

4. Since the majority of the games come in BIN and CUE files (in my case, it sometimes comes with a lot of "Track" BIN's), what is the best tool for converting these files into a single ISO file? Also, which do I convert first: the BIN file, or the CUE file?

To compact all the tracks into one big BIN file, you can use a very useful utility CDmage, which will save it into bin/cue. ISO format in this case is not suitable.

[tvtoon]

Just to complement...

1. Why is it that when I download a PlayStation or Saturn game, it sometimes come with a CUE and SO MANY BIN's that are classified as "Tracks" like a music album?

You are probably referring to the redump.org format, where everything is split as binary data. It is the generic way to dump stuff, because audio tracks theoretically can be anything, not only WAV files, so it preserves the data track.

For instance, I usually dump stuff like that.

2. Why do those games come in BIN/CUE files and not ISO images? (A little misleading, don't you think?)

3. Why do these games sometimes come in different files that are NOT BIN/CUE or ISO files?

CD data is not only the ISO9660 filesystem (2048 bytes), there is a whole 2352 set. As Bregalad told, it is made so because "mode 2" can be anything, unlike "mode 1" that is a "basic" standard. Basically, when you are converting blindly from "mode 2", you lose data.

4. Since the majority of the games come in BIN and CUE files (in my case, it sometimes comes with a lot of "Track" BIN's), what is the best tool for converting these files into a single ISO file? Also, which do I convert first: the BIN file, or the CUE file?

I have been working on a tool to fix a lot of things regarding binary images, tripleswap, it isn't ready for some great purpose yet.

When converting stuff, always use the CUEsheet or any other Table of Contents file, not the binary data. Just to reiterate, I don't recommend converting that format if you are using PlayStation images.

[Jorpho]

To be specific, a .CUE file is just a plain old text file that you can open in Notepad or any other text editor.  The .CUE file will then reference one or more .BIN files, specifying a different data type or mode as necessary – or .ISO files or .WAV files, if that happens to be the data type in question.