Spyro – Year Of The Dragon SCES-02835.bin Rom/Emulator file, which is available for free download on RomsEmulator.net. You can use emulator to play the Playstation games on your Windows PC, Mac, Android and iPhone. Compress the ECM file (i.e. Filename.bin.ecm) using your favorite compression program (i.e. Back up, transmit via Internet, or whatever you normally do with CD images! When you want to burn the CD again, extract the original CD image from the ECM file. Each bin-file represents a track on the game CD-ROM. From my experience, the first track is always data and any subsequent tracks are audio - at least for PlayStation 1 games. Unfortunately, emulators and virtual drive managers won't load multiple tracks automatically. I have PCSX for Mac and want to play a few games, but the ones I really love have an ugly.ecm filetype. Does anyone know of a converter for these types of.
Some CD Images are packed in the ECM file format. This can only be read by programs explicitly designed to deal with ECM files. Luckily, there are tools available that allow you to convert these files into much more usable formats such as ISO or Cue/Bin files. This guide shows you how to use ECM Tools to accomplish this conversion.
The reason why some files come in ECM format is because this format compresses the CD image substantially in an effort to not only save disc space, but also bandwidth in the process. That is why some of these files come in ECM formats. Decompressing these files is very straight forward once you have the tools needed. For this guide, we will be using ECM Tools.
First, you need to download ECM Tools which can be located here The RAR archive contains all the files needed to decompress ECM files. (Update May 13, 2020: Old link is now dead, try this).
Find a convenient place on your hard drive for your ECM needs. Next, open the archive and drag and drop the files into this folder. Once done, you’ll have a set of files ready to use. To use ECM tools, find the ECM file in question and drag and drop it over the unecm.exe file. Unecm.exe will automatically open up the ECM file, decompress the file, and close after.
That’s it! You now have a useable CD image that has been decompressed!
Happy computing!
Emulating games is fun, but while SNES, NES and Genesis games are easy to find and run, PlayStation games are a bit more complicated. Unlike the others, they come in a dozen of different disc formats.
Most commonly, you'll find PlayStation games distributed as a zip-file and inside you'll find one or more bin files. Each bin-file represents a track on the game CD-ROM. From my experience, the first track is always data and any subsequent tracks are audio - at least for PlayStation 1 games. Unfortunately, emulators and virtual drive managers won't load multiple tracks automatically. They need something called a cue sheet, which is a special textfile that works as a tracklist. It's supposed to represent a CD-ROM and define which tracks are on the CD-ROM, which order, what format they are (data or audio) and the filename of the bin file for each track.
Given the importance of this cue sheet, it's sad how distributors of roms often forget to generate/include the file (or include an invalid one). For ePSXe, it seems that you can load the first bin directly, but background music will be missing and you'll be disappointed. 😞
With a little technical skill and a great deal of patience you can write suitable cue-files yourself for each of your games in notepad, but it's errorprone, boring and it can be automated. So guess what... I wrote the script, so you don't have to! 😊
Prior to making this webpage, I found a few existing tools that attempt to solve this issue. I tried three different ones - Thorst's CueMaker, Liors Cue Maker 2.4 and Lior's Cue Maker unknown version. Unfortunately, neither of the tools seem to support games with multiple bin files and since these games are the ones that won't have music without a cue sheet, these tools don't really solve the problem.
Ecm Converter
This webpage also assumes that the first track is data, while all subsequent tracks are audio. This assumption seems to hold true for every PlayStation game I have tried so far.
Drag your bin files onto the dropzone below and have the cue sheet generated automatically. Your files will not be uploaded or anything. The dropzone is used to read the filenames of the bins, so this webpage can generate a cue sheet for you.