PSXImager is a collection of tools for dumping and (pre-)mastering PlayStation 1 (”PSX”) CD-ROM images. It consists of three tools:

• psxrip - Dumps the contents of the data track of a binary CD image (”BIN/CUE”) to a directory tree plus a “catalog” file containing filesystem metadata.
• psxbuild - The inverse of psxrip; takes a catalog file and a directory tree to produce a binary CD image which can be burned to a CD medium.
• psxinject - Replaces the contents of a file inside a binary CD image.

What sets PSXImager apart from standard ISO 9660 imaging tools is that PSXImager handles images in the CD-ROM XA format, which is what the PlayStation 1 uses.

CD-ROM XA, defined by Sony and Philips, is an extension to the “Yellow Book” and ISO 9660 standards, and also used by Video and Photo CDs. The main extensions of XA are:

• CD-ROM sectors contain an additional 8 bytes of “subheader” data for storing information related to audio/video files (data type, codec and channel information, etc.).
• Directory entries contain more attributes, such as Unix-style owner/group IDs and permissions.
• Most importantly, XA allows “Form 2″ files with 2324 data bytes per sector (as opposed to the regular 2048 bytes) which are recorded in special CD-ROM sectors (”Mode 2, Form 2″). This allows storing more data on a CD (up to ~740MB) at the cost of having no error correction for this data. Form 2 files are primarily used for audio/video data, in particular the FMVs of most PlayStation 1 games.

“Red Book” CD-DA audio tracks are not handled by PSXImager.

PSXImager is based on code from the GNU VCDImager project and uses the libcdio and libvcdinfo libraries for most of its work.