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Convert Playstation CDs


SpiceWare

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Ran across my Playstation CDs last week and wondered if I could get them to work with OpenEMU.
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So I took a look at the OpenEmu User-Guide and found the section on CD based games. I thought it was odd that the instructions for a Mac only emulator only listed Windows only tools for converting your CD to use with OpenEMU.

 

After reviewing the guide it looked like you only needed 2 things:

  1. Rips from the CD. The CD will consist of one or more tracks. For data tracks create ISO files, for audio tracks create WAV, OGG or FLAC files.
  2. A CUE file, which is a text based index of the tracks on the CD.

For now I thought I'd concentrate only on CDs with only 1 track as the CUE file for those is extremely simple:

FILE "filename.iso" BINARY  TRACK 01 MODE2/2352    INDEX 01 00:00:00


 


Make the ISO
First up was how to make an ISO. Turns out that's really simple, just use Disk Utility, which is included with OS X. You'll find it in the Utilities folder - quickest way to get there is use the Finder's Go menu, you'll find Utilities towards the bottom. Once opened, find and launch Disk Utility.

 

Utilities folder


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Put your Playstation game in your drive, I'm using Spyro the Dragon(the game that got me back into consoles), then find and select the drive in Disk Utility. My Mac Pro uses an external drive, so it's listed in that group:

 

find drive


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Create a new image by selected the menu File->New Image->Image from "Untitled". I don't know why it shows "untitled" when Disk Utility clearly shows the name is Spryo.

 

create image


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Specify where to save it and change the Format to DVD/CD Master:

 

specify format


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Click Save and after a while you'll end up with a CDR file.

 

From here you can open up the terminal and use a command line tool to convert the CDR file into an ISO, but it turns out you can just use the CDR file as is. On the off chance you want to convert it, this is the command:

hdiutil convert spyro.cdr -format UDTO -o spyro.iso


 

Make the CUE
For Spyro this is super simple. Start up TextEdit then select menu option Format->Make Plain Text. Copy this bit of text:

FILE "filename.iso" BINARY  TRACK 01 MODE2/2352    INDEX 01 00:00:00



paste it into TextEdit then change filename.iso to match the CDR name:
FILE "spyro.cdr" BINARY  TRACK 01 MODE2/2352    INDEX 01 00:00:00



And save it with extension CUE next to the CDR file you created with Disk Utility:

 

saved CUE


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Add to OpenEmu
Launch OpenEMU and select Sony Playstation. Drag and Drop the CUE file. OpenEmu will start to scan the game to import it:

 

after drag & drop


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One processed the game will show up, complete with artwork and the proper name:

 

after import


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So far I've processed 6 games:

 

games in OpenEmu


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Some example gameplay:

 

Spryo the Dragon


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Einhänder


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Crash Bandicoot


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Overall the games worked well, though there were some hiccups.
  1. Sometimes a game will stutter. My mini's sporting a 2.6 GHz quad core i7.
  2. Sometimes the analog control would get stuck. On occasion Spyro would keep walking even though I'd let go of the stick. If I move the stick around it'll unstick, but I did die a couple times when Spyro walked off a ledge. I have Playstation controllers paired with my Mini and have not run into this problem with other games, so there's something up with OpenEmu's emulation of the analog sticks.
  3. At first I thought Crash and Einhänder weren't working. I'd forgotten that the Playstation controllers did not originally have analog sticks, so some of the earlier games don't know how to use them and thus must be played with the D-Pad.
    276px-PSX-Original-Controller.jpg



CDs with audio
While I have not looked into this yet, I thought it would be best to show you how to tell if you inserted a Playstation CD with audio tracks. The CD will show up twice in Finder:

 

CD with audio


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If you check their contents you'll find that one of them contains AIFF files:

 

CD audio files


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14 Comments


Recommended Comments

I, too, just recently started playing my Playstation and Playstation 2 games!

You _have_ to have Activision's Asteroids (PS1) although that has a cue and two bin tracks. I can't stop playing it!

I can email to you info what I made that works, or just tell me if you want info on the bins or the iso... milehaas999 yahoo.com

 

Also there are ways to make a single CD image of games that were on 2 CD's. Driver 2 is like a 970 MB CD, kind of not possible physically, but the emulators don't care.

 

On the PS2 running a PS1 emulation from USB hard drive or USB flash drive, formatting with FAT32 and large 6K sector blocks can reduce stuttering. Some suggested 32K or 64K blocks but I can't figure how to format that.

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Asteroids is in my stack, haven't looked at converting it yet. Could you post a follow-up comment with the contents of your CUE file in a code block? That should help me figure out how to convert the CD. Thanks!

 

The instructions on making a M3U file for a multi-disc set look pretty straight forward, though I don't have any multi-disc games.

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I was looking into this a few months ago as well. I'm also using pretty much the exact same setup as you (quad 2.6GHz i7 Mac mini, external LG drive), so this should work for you as well.

 

https://emulationonmac.wordpress.com/2015/07/26/preserving-cd-and-dvd-based-console-games-pt-3-the-bin-cue-format/

 

The post isn't Mac specific, but you can install cdrdao using homebrew on your Mac. I think once you do that, the instructions pretty much just work. You'll get both a .bin file (which you can rename to .cdr) and a .cue file in two easy command line steps.

 

I have a few more PS1 discs to rip on my end, so I'll try ripping those in the next few days to make sure I didn't forget anything else.

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I was looking into this a few months ago as well. I'm also using pretty much the exact same setup as you (quad 2.6GHz i7 Mac mini, external LG drive), so this should work for you as well.

Actually I did the rip on my Mac Pro as it's faster than the mini. I just transfer the results over to the mini so I can play on my HDTV.

 

That looks really easy. Not familiar with Homebrew so I'll have to read up on it. That article also mentions MacPorts and Fink, which look to be comparable to Homebrew - any particular reason you use it over the other two?

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Of course you could just put the CDs into your PS2 or PS3 :)

 

True but almost every time I power on the PS3 it makes me install an update before I can do anything. The mini's always on, and if it wants an update it lets me differ it until later.

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Actually I did the rip on my Mac Pro as it's faster than the mini. I just transfer the results over to the mini so I can play on my HDTV.

 

That looks really easy. Not familiar with Homebrew so I'll have to read up on it. That article also mentions MacPorts and Fink, which look to be comparable to Homebrew - any particular reason you use it over the other two?

 

I gave up on using Fink because I always ran into problems with it. I liked Homebrew because of how it keeps everything contained under /usr/local. Very easy to setup and use. And no real opinion on MacPorts -- never looked into it too much once Homebrew came along :)

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I gave up on using Fink because I always ran into problems with it. I liked Homebrew because of how it keeps everything contained under /usr/local. Very easy to setup and use. And no real opinion on MacPorts -- never looked into it too much once Homebrew came along :)

Sounds good to me, I'll install Homebrew this weekend so I can try out cdrdao.

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Asteroids.cue

FILE "Asteroids (Track 1).bin" BINARY
  TRACK 01 MODE2/2352
    INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "Asteroids (Track 2).bin" BINARY
  TRACK 02 AUDIO
    INDEX 00 00:00:00
    INDEX 01 00:02:00

Also neat: It is not that hard to unlock the 1979 Asteroids game.

  • Like 1
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I decided to revisit Spyro with the latest build of OpenEMU. The analog controller issues I mentioned in the blog are no longer an issue.

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