Psx Rom Format

[BaDToaD]

I've amassed a small collection of PSX CDs bought off ebay over the last few months in preparation for the arrival of my Pandora. Now things are looking like the Pandora could be in my hands sometime soon (two months? ) I thought I'd start ripping them to HD.

So my question is. What is the current preferred format for PSX ROMS on the Pandora PSX Emulator? Also, and this has been asked before, what are some current decent ripping tools. We may as well have current info all in one thread.

ToaD

 

[Lostfragment]

I GUESS you can just use the standard psx formats like .bin and .iso

and for ripping the games I'd use magic iso.

 

[ImmaculateChimp]

Having sent a similar list of questions to Zodttd something like, four months ago and never getting a reply, I would also be interested to know the answers to BaDToaD's inquiries.

 

[Nintendo]

Here, I'll answer your questions.

All of the files in my above example can be used/played on Pandora.

 

[BaDToaD]

Thanks for that Sony but which is the best format? i.e size vs speed etc. I know many formats work but there was talk about various compressed formats possibly being implemented several months ago but I haven't found confirmation of those.

 

[Mr B]

Funny, i would expect the only rom's to be present in a PSX emulator is the BIOS. The CD's on the other hand, are just that. CD's. you'd rip them to disc, and make a CD image. "most" emulators" doesn't really care much about the format, since CD images typically are uncompressed, and contain little, or no "extra" data. Depending on the emulator you can however get away with ripping the data track separately from the audio tracks (if any) and compress the audio tracks in to MP3's. Another option some emulators support is simply compressing the whole CD image with zip, rar, och 7z..

SONY's example above really isn't helpful, simply due to not letting you know what file types it really is, but rather telling you what the description of said file type is. Usually you'll be using bin/cue sets, or .iso images, but CCD, BWI, RAW, and many other formats works with most common emulators. You'll probably not need to worry about these since the more exotic file types were a result from circumventing copy protections efforts by using burning-software that was able to mimic the end results in different ways when burning the disc.

What it all boils down to. Use what ever burning-software you already got on your computer to "rip the ROMs" and save them with the default filetype. Or pick up a free software as MagicISO, CDburnerXP, DvD Decrypter, and son. None is more "right" then the other, at this point. And any emulator will support bin/cue & iso file formats, unless they only support a proprietary format.
Proprietary formats could be used to compress textures, said audiotracks, or by other means provide a "feature" for a emulator in the hunt of gaining full speed emulation, and i don't see this as likely, since full speed emulation likely isn't going to be a problem. It's common practice to modify PSX images to make them run on PSP, by providing them with a new executable, similar practice COULD be adopted for a emulator, but i fail to see the point really. It wouldn't be emulating as much as providing a Pandora native executable that runs with the games data. And the exe would have to be uniqe for each game, making it a very silly way to approach the concept of PSX gaming. Either way. Any means of making such a proprietary file format would start with a ISO or bin/cue set anyway, so rip your cd's to these image types to your hearts content.

(I admit tho, i haven't kept updated on the specifics of a Pandora PSX emulator, however i believe i saw a full speed video demo without frame skip a while back?)
B!

 

[elwing]

Funny, i would expect the only rom's to be present in a PSX emulator is the BIOS. The CD's on the other hand, are just that.

hum, CD-Rom? :lol:

 

[BaDToaD]

Funny, i would expect the only rom's to be present in a PSX emulator is the BIOS. The CD's on the other hand, are just that.

hum, CD-Rom? :lol:

I LOL'd

 

[bzar]

Funny, i would expect the only rom's to be present in a PSX emulator is the BIOS. The CD's on the other hand, are just that.

hum, CD-Rom? :lol:

I LOL'd

+1 :lol:

 

[Kangal]

.... Or pick up a free software as MagicISO, CDburnerXP, DvD Decrypter, and son.

So just pick up DvD Decrypter and son :lol:
funny how one letter can change everything.
that's the last time I'll end an email with "Regards", the G and T keys are too close. oh no

 

[Miner49er]

.... Or pick up a free software as MagicISO, CDburnerXP, DvD Decrypter, and son.

So just pick up DvD Decrypter and son :lol:
funny how one letter can change everything.
that's the last time I'll end an email with "Regards", the G and T keys are too close. oh no

Can't you just do:

dd if=/dev/hdd of=game.iso

(or whatever device is your cdrom instead of /dev/hdd)

 

[kmob]

I asked something similar in the old thread as I was interested in formats to use to get CDDA working. The info (speculation?) in that thread (which is now old) was that CDDA isn't going to be supported on the Pandora. So there's no point in ripping audio tracks regardless of what format you choose. See here for the comments.

 

[Prometheus]

I hope nobody minds, but I wrote out a post on ripping these things in another recent thread, so I'm just going to quote that.

I can't speak for anyone else, kingoddball, but myself I just use cdrdao on Linux to rip my discs to bin/toc format. The only thing is that it's not so useful for games that use redbook audio (that is, standard CD audio tracks), as fewer emulators seem to support TOC files for this (and also the program to convert TOC to CUE doesn't work properly, resulting in converted files giving the same static noise as ever). But, if you want to know how it's done, I'll outline my method below.

I'm assuming you have cdrdao installed. If you don't, run this in a terminal window and hit enter;

sudo aptitude install cdrdao

Once that's done with, put the disc in the drive, and run this in the terminal window;

cdrdao copy --keepimage

It'll then rip the disc to your home directory, along with a corresponding TOC (Table of Contents) file, and prompt you to insert a burnable disc - ignore this request for now.

Rename the image and the TOC file to your liking (they must have the same name - so, Game.bin and Game.toc, for example), and open the TOC file (it's just a normal text file) and edit it so that the .bin file it refers to there has the name you gave yours, and move them to wherever you're keeping your rips.

After that, just choose the kill-task option in your terminal emulator of choice (this is probably not the cleanest way of stopping cdrdao from asking for a blank disc to copy to, I admit, but it's worked for me so far ).

I've used this method for every PSX game I own (including my most recent acquisition), and each rip works perfectly in every emulator I've thrown them at.

This was written with Debian-based Linux distributions in mind, so if you use a Red Hat-based one, the installation method is (of course) different. But that's the gist of it.

@kmob - The post you linked to is from Tinnus, who if memory serves is one of the people working on that emulator. I'm pretty sure that he's not saying it isn't going to be supported, as you say - I'm fairly sure he was saying that at the time, it wasn't (and may still not be).

 

[goonaman]

I looked through old threads to see if eboot files were going to be supported and there was something about it being considered a while back. Would be really useful to save on space if we could use compressed files. Is there any news on eboot support?

 

[Javacat]

As long as you rip in some format that preserves both data and audio tracks from the CD, it probably doesn't really matter what format you use. The slowest process is going to be getting the data from the CD onto your hard drives anyway. Once you've got it, converting from one format to another is pretty easy if you find whatever one you have used isn't supported by PSX4All (or whatever the emulator is called now ).

I'm pretty sure that Zodttd mentioned some compression formats that could be used when the emulator was in early development (for the GP2X?), but I can't remember any more than that as it was a few years ago now. I can remember though that people were using some special program for ripping/compressing the music/videos on the games which significantly reduced the file sizes.

Whatever's the case, I'd just rip the files as cue/bin files to be stored on my desktop as the 'master copies' and then compress the games to copy them onto an SD card in whatever format is used and delete the compressed file off the desktop.




FakeEdit: I think I was thinking of eboot files, which goonaman just posted

 

[Jourdy288]

I hope nobody minds, but I wrote out a post on ripping these things in another recent thread, so I'm just going to quote that.

I can't speak for anyone else, kingoddball, but myself I just use cdrdao on Linux to rip my discs to bin/toc format. The only thing is that it's not so useful for games that use redbook audio (that is, standard CD audio tracks), as fewer emulators seem to support TOC files for this (and also the program to convert TOC to CUE doesn't work properly, resulting in converted files giving the same static noise as ever). But, if you want to know how it's done, I'll outline my method below.

I'm assuming you have cdrdao installed. If you don't, run this in a terminal window and hit enter;

sudo aptitude install cdrdao

Once that's done with, put the disc in the drive, and run this in the terminal window;

cdrdao copy --keepimage

It'll then rip the disc to your home directory, along with a corresponding TOC (Table of Contents) file, and prompt you to insert a burnable disc - ignore this request for now.

Rename the image and the TOC file to your liking (they must have the same name - so, Game.bin and Game.toc, for example), and open the TOC file (it's just a normal text file) and edit it so that the .bin file it refers to there has the name you gave yours, and move them to wherever you're keeping your rips.

After that, just choose the kill-task option in your terminal emulator of choice (this is probably not the cleanest way of stopping cdrdao from asking for a blank disc to copy to, I admit, but it's worked for me so far ).

I've used this method for every PSX game I own (including my most recent acquisition), and each rip works perfectly in every emulator I've thrown them at.

This was written with Debian-based Linux distributions in mind, so if you use a Red Hat-based one, the installation method is (of course) different. But that's the gist of it.

@kmob - The post you linked to is from Tinnus, who if memory serves is one of the people working on that emulator. I'm pretty sure that he's not saying it isn't going to be supported, as you say - I'm fairly sure he was saying that at the time, it wasn't (and may still not be).

I hate to go OT, but in another tab I was reading this thread. Guess who is mentioned too?
http://yoyofr.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=2576

 

[gibberish]

the only truly accurate way to dump psx discs is by using the no-intro method which looks like this:

WipEout (USA) (Track 1).bin
WipEout (USA) (Track 2).bin
WipEout (USA) (Track 3).bin
WipEout (USA) (Track 4).bin
WipEout (USA) (Track 5).bin
WipEout (USA) (Track 6).bin
WipEout (USA) (Track 7).bin
WipEout (USA) (Track 8).bin
WipEout (USA) (Track 9).bin
WipEout (USA).cue

currently epsxe doesnt support this format unless you mount the image via daemon tools first. i dont know about psx4all, but it would be very useful for serious collectors if it was supported.

 

[Lobo]

Just rip them as BIN/CUE which is the most standard format available for PS emus. Later you can compress them with PocketIso if Zottd/Tinnus decides to implement that .Z/.ZNX compression we had on the gp2x (highly likely I'd guess).

As for this No-Intro method: care to be more specific? Sounds to me to be an exaggeration calling it the "only truly accurate way" when it's not even saving out sub-channel info.

 

[may88]

I've used cdrao. Maybe the settings it was using but I had issues with sub-channel data (PAL version of tombraider needs this - a part of the copy protection).
Also if the disk is mixed data and audio it tasks an absolute age to copy.

For a Windows solution: Alcohol52% is the only free one I could find that seems to do the trick.
This creates .mds and .mdf files - not sure if they're compatible with the emulator.

 

[gibberish]

Just rip them as BIN/CUE which is the most standard format available for PS emus. Later you can compress them with PocketIso if Zottd/Tinnus decides to implement that .Z/.ZNX compression we had on the gp2x (highly likely I'd guess).

As for this No-Intro method: care to be more specific? Sounds to me to be an exaggeration calling it the "only truly accurate way" when it's not even saving out sub-channel info.

sorry i meant redump.. no-intro is for roms.
and you'll have to bear with me while i find the technical details.