Ripping PS1 games

[Fzero]

I know there's a PSX thread somewhere bit think it's been buried so not ressurecting it


I did read one of you mention a bot of s/w used to copy ps1 roms, I know I can nab them online anyway, but if I got some classics on eBay and wanted to rip them to .bin/.cue to use with Zodds emu...


... what's the deal with version numbers?


I know with my iPhone psx emu I can only run certain games, I think due to them being 0.37b or whatever


so what's the Pandora emu saying? What version do my roms need to be in? Also, what's a good bit of ware that will let me make the bin/cue files from my original discs in the correct version, be it 0.37b or whatever?


Not something I done before, in the past I just d/l and hope they run, some do some don't


cheers

 

[sebt3]

http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/53307-psx-rom-format/

 

[SNESFAN]

http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/53307-psx-rom-format/

did they ever come up with the most compressed format that works well though?


EBOOT, .z, or no-intro? they were talking about it but it looks like nobody ever answered that one


I have quite a few .img/cue/bins I would like the know the best format so I can start re-compressing / re-ripping them now

 

[Fzero]

That's the post I'd read - cheers


I'm still a bit confused with this 0.37b version etc, I guess that might all be obvious once I actually do a rip of a disc using those softwares, but I havnt in the past.


I know nothing about these versions other than when searching before about why a rom didn't work on my PSP ps1 emu I found lots of people talking about it needing to be specifically 0.37b roms only, so the one I had probably wasn't that version hense didn't work for me.


Maybe the pandora psx emu isn't even as fussy and will play various version builds?

 

[SNESFAN]

...so can anyone WITH a pandora determine any speed advantages in one format vs another? also ntsc vs pal?


I guess I can wait and try it myself once I get mine in the undetermined future but was just wanting someone with experience to shed some light on this subject.

 

[second exodous]

This is a major issue with PSX emulators. What we really need is a program that you can plug a USB cd rom into the Pandora to rip directly to the Pandora. Then again I don't have a USB CDROM as I'm sure other don't but I do have a SATA to USB adapter and I do this, keep up now. . .


In my normal tower PC I unplug the SATA cable from my Blu-ray and plug it into one of these and plug that into one of these cables and then put one of these on the end and wallah, instant USB Blu-ray as long as I'm right next to my desktop PC and it is on(don't unplug the power form the Blu-ray when you unplug the SATA cable). It is a lot cheaper than buying a USB optical media drive for my Eee box, especially considering the only part I didn't really have to start with is the eSATA to USB adapter.


I thought It was a rather ingenious idea when I needed to use a CDROM on my Eeebox, so if you ever need a CDROM for you Pandora keep this guide in mind. Not portable in any sense of the mind, but if someone did make a program to rip PSX CDs right no the Pandora. . .

 

[SNESFAN]

This is a major issue with PSX emulators. What we really need is a program that you can plug a USB cd rom into the Pandora to rip directly to the Pandora. Then again I don't have a USB CDROM as I'm sure other don't but I do have a SATA to USB adapter and I do this, keep up now. . .


In my normal tower PC I unplug the SATA cable from my Blu-ray and plug it into one of these and plug that into one of these cables and then put one of these on the end and wallah, instant USB Blu-ray as long as I'm right next to my desktop PC and it is on(don't unplug the power form the Blu-ray when you unplug the SATA cable). It is a lot cheaper than buying a USB optical media drive for my Eee box, especially considering the only part I didn't really have to start with is the eSATA to USB adapter.


I thought It was a rather ingenious idea when I needed to use a CDROM on my Eeebox, so if you ever need a CDROM for you Pandora keep this guide in mind. Not portable in any sense of the mind, but if someone did make a program to rip PSX CDs right no the Pandora. . .

wait what? is the sdcard i/o a bottleneck or something?


I was expecting to hear something like eboot or cso was slower because of the compression and iso/cue/bin was faster but... you kinda just threw me for a loop with what you're suggesting, care to explain what you mean "major issue"?

 

[WizardStan]

Whether compressed or not, the read speed is still going to be HUGE in comparison to the original CDs. Supposing a game previously had a load time of 60 seconds: assuming the bottleneck was actually reading the data, a modest SD card could load that same data in about 3 seconds. Maybe compression takes longer, we'll pretend it's twice as long, so 6 seconds. I don't know about you, but my brain is going "whoopdy freakin' doo"


Of course this is slightly wrong: simply loading the data is rarely the bottleneck; it also has to process that data. So let's assume half the time is loading, the other half is processing. That makes for originally 30 seconds to load the data and 30 seconds to process it, but on SD cards, we get a modest 1.5 seconds to load the data and 30 seconds (assuming the emulator is still going 1:1) to process it (31.5 seconds total) or 3 seconds for a slower format (33 seconds total). Even this is wrong, because it can do processing while it is loading. End result is probably likely to be even closer than the 1.5 seconds I've given.


These numbers are all made up, but they're based on certain understandings about CD and SD speeds, and how the playstation loads things. Long story short, it doesn't really matter, since the loading time is so much faster than the original CD and most of your time is spent in processing and not loading anyway; load speed should not be a consideration when deciding what format you want to use.

 

[second exodous]

wait what? is the sdcard i/o a bottleneck or something?

I was expecting to hear something like eboot or cso was slower because of the compression and iso/cue/bin was faster but... you kinda just threw me for a loop with what you're suggesting, care to explain what you mean "major issue"?

Well, the process I just explained was really to tell people a cheap way to have a cdrom for the Pandora if they ever need one, not really related to PSX rips other than if someone made a PSX ripper for the Pandora that would rip the PSX game and pack it right on the Pandora.


The problem that I was talking about is every time I install a PSX emulator on my computer the PSX rips I have won't work so I read on the emulator's forums and find out how to rip them. After I find out I usually burn them from the file I have and then re-rip them so they'll work with said emulator. It seems that there are a thousand and one different ways to rip PSX games out there and emulators are picky about how they are ripped. I haven't emulated PSX for a long time because of this, I don't know if different PSX emulators have this problem anymore or not.


Anyway, if that is not an issue anymore then you can just ignore my previous post. If you ever need to use a CDROM on a Pandora then that is a cheap way to do it if not confusing.

 

[SNESFAN]

Whether compressed or not, the read speed is still going to be HUGE in comparison to the original CDs. Supposing a game previously had a load time of 60 seconds: assuming the bottleneck was actually reading the data, a modest SD card could load that same data in about 3 seconds. Maybe compression takes longer, we'll pretend it's twice as long, so 6 seconds. I don't know about you, but my brain is going "whoopdy freakin' doo"


Of course this is slightly wrong: simply loading the data is rarely the bottleneck; it also has to process that data. So let's assume half the time is loading, the other half is processing. That makes for originally 30 seconds to load the data and 30 seconds to process it, but on SD cards, we get a modest 1.5 seconds to load the data and 30 seconds (assuming the emulator is still going 1:1) to process it (31.5 seconds total) or 3 seconds for a slower format (33 seconds total). Even this is wrong, because it can do processing while it is loading. End result is probably likely to be even closer than the 1.5 seconds I've given.


These numbers are all made up, but they're based on certain understandings about CD and SD speeds, and how the playstation loads things. Long story short, it doesn't really matter, since the loading time is so much faster than the original CD and most of your time is spent in processing and not loading anyway; load speed should not be a consideration when deciding what format you want to use.

thanks for the insightfullness of your post stan

not to make it seem all that you said was in vain, but what I gather from what you said is loading shouldn't be an issue as it's not the main bottleneck (which i didn't think was the case to begin with, but was second guessing myself for a second)


the question now is processing uncompressed vs compressed data going to cause any significant amount of delay in real world playing of games? or is the delay going to be not noticeable?


Say have a psx eboot of say 300mb is it going to run noticeably slower than the uncompressed iso running at 700mb? i can care less about initial loading


I've also heard PAL versions of psx games run faster than NTSC due to the differences in the amount of lines that must be rendered, is this true? Is there a noticeable realworld difference in the two?

 

[Prometheus]

^ As far as I know, it's not due to the number of lines*, but I have noticed that some PAL games *do* run faster on psx4pandora than their NTSC equivalents because they were optimised for running at 50Hz and therefore may have had speed-hacks and the like in place, which seems to have an effect in emulators that may be running them a little too slowly. (I've been able to compare this directly with at least one title, because I own both a PAL and NTSC version of it. If you've ever heard the English voice-acting in Mega Man 8, you'll know why! :lol: )


*(In most cases, a PAL game will have the same number of lines as the NTSC one, but will display on a television with large black bars because the game does not use the extra lines PAL makes available, or it will use more lines than the original if the developers put the time in to do so.)


Anyway, I doubt that there would be much of a difference between compressed and uncompressed rips, although at this time it's a bit moot because I'm pretty sure that psx4pandora only supports uncompressed ones right now anyway.


Unrelatedly, for the record, running this command on a Linux box works best for me - all of my games rip and work just fine with this (credit to Exophase for helping me out with the proper usage of cdrdao ), and it only takes a few minutes per disc. You end up with an uncompressed bin/cue rip of your disc. (To prevent confusion, I'm just putting this here in case anybody finds it useful, it's not part of my response to the above post. )

cdrdao read-cd --read-raw --datafile [insert desired filename].bin --device /dev/cdrom --driver generic-mmc-raw [same name].cue

If this throws up an error, change the bolded part to --device ATAPI:0,0,0 or --device ATAPI:1,2,0 instead.

 

[EvilDragon]

I'm using a simple script I grabbed somewhere on my Linux Box:

#!/bin/bash
export PSXDIR=/home/michi/PSXRIP
if [ $1 -z -o $2 -n ];
        then
        echo "\nERROR: Invalid usage.\n"
        echo "\n  Usage: psxrip [filename]\n"
        echo "\n  where filename is the desired name, minus extensions.\n"
fi
cd /usr/bin
./cdrdao read-cd --read-raw --datafile $PSXDIR/$1.bin --device /dev/sr0 --driver generic-mmc-raw $PSXDIR/$1.cue

Of course, you need to change the device (/dev/sr0) according to your system and the PSXDIR according to where you want to save the ripped file.


Then run PocketISO with WINE to compress it - and that's it

[/CODE]

 

[SNESFAN]

Anyway, I doubt that there would be much of a difference between compressed and uncompressed rips, although at this time it's a bit moot because I'm pretty sure that psx4pandora only supports uncompressed ones right now anyway.

thanks for the response about the PAL games, I've heard similar before, and that confirms it is probably true. If I find a sluggish game I'll attempt see if I can't trade my NTSC version for PAL version of that game off ebay or something


so psx4pandora doesn't support compressed images? I thought psx4all was derived from what was ported to the pandora? psx4droid (I think based off psx4all) says it supports compressed eboots, cso and other formats... psx4all on the dingoo also supports this I think... I'll double check this, and this was the whole reason for bringing up this conversation. I want to make the most efficient use of the space I have. I have a huge collection of games for my psone (100+ games don't judge me! lol) and was trying to fit as many as I could on a single SD


psx4all -dingoo


http://www.dingoowiki.com/index.php?title=Psx4all#File_Format


psx4droid


http://www.appbrain.com/app/psx4droid-(psx-emulator)/com.zodttd.psx

 

[EvilDragon]

so psx4pandora doesn't support compressed images?

Did you... read my post above yours?

 

[SNESFAN]

Did you... read my post above yours?

i did.... but I was quoting prometheus, he said psx4pandora doesn't support compressed images.


Does pocketiso provide the same level of compression as cso and all that? I've seen almost half the size of some roms after compression for the psp and ran just fine without the loss of content.


I looked at pocketiso briefly and I'm not a huge technical person, but it appeared at first glance that it stripped movie files and music files out of the image, I was hoping not to lose movies and all that if at all possible. Please forgive my ignorance if I'm just reading what it's doing wrong. The way I was reading it was similar to "no-intro" images which I'm trying to stay away from.

 

[Prometheus]

i did.... but I was quoting prometheus, he said psx4pandora doesn't support compressed images.

I should clarify that I said I was pretty sure. I could be misremembering, though. (Also, I'm a she, but that's by the by. :lol: )

 

[SNESFAN]

found this


http://bit.ly/bDsevs


it confirms the 50fps full speed PAL thing, and a good app fro compressing images hopefully it helps those who are kinda novice to this stuff like myself

 

[#1 GameMaster]

I just went through and compressed a game that was an .iso into a .cso, .iso.bz, and an .eboot all at highest compression.


ISO = 628MB


CSO = 484MB


ISO.bz = 474MB


EBOOT = 436MB


So it seems that if eboot is supported that is your best bet for smallest amount of space if not pocketiso will be the best one for you and it only rips the music and videos from the ISO if you tell it to, because before you can compress an ISO you have to first Analyze it then it shows all the videos and music files and how big they are so you can decide to leave them in or rip them out.

 

[second exodous]

I just went through and compressed a game that was an .iso into a .cso, .iso.bz, and an .eboot all at highest compression.

ISO = 628MB


CSO = 484MB


ISO.bz = 474MB


EBOOT = 436MB


So it seems that if eboot is supported that is your best bet for smallest amount of space if not pocketiso will be the best one for you and it only rips the music and videos from the ISO if you tell it to, because before you can compress an ISO you have to first Analyze it then it shows all the videos and music files and how big they are so you can decide to leave them in or rip them out.

Wow, those compression rates are not that impressive anyway. I'm planning on getting double 32GB cards so maybe I don't need to worry about compression. If someone does definitively find out that compressed games play better I might but I think I just won't worry about it, then I can steer clear of all these weird game compression programs. ISO.bz I'm sure doesn't need a special program though.

 

[spud42]

some games have sub channel data on the original PS1 disk and this is lost with a BIN/CUE rip. only way to get the full information is to rip with clone cd giving a .ccd image.


psx-scene has a lot of info on PS1 EMUS etc......