- Steps Open the folder and look for 'unecm.exe' Click and hold the ECM file, then drag it on top of 'unecm.exe' and let it go. Wait for the process to finish. Once the process is finished, the window will close automatically, and the ECM file will be a BIN file.
- HERE`S HOW TO USE IT: Run the CD image file (i.e. Filename.bin) through GEMC to create an ECM file (i.e. 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.
- Welcome to VisiHow. This is a tutorial on how to decompress PlayStation 1 games. Compressed PlayStation 1 games have the 'ECM' extension. On the desktop, there is 'Crash Bash.bin.ecm' this means that this is a compressed file and no emulators will play it. Compressing PS1 games is done to conserve space on the hard drive.
Extract the 7.zip file, then exctract the bin.ecm inside, download ecm100, take the.bin.ecm and drag it onto the unecm.exe, it will decompress it and you will have a.bin file, join it with the.cue in the first zip file.
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! 😊
Convert Ecm File To Bin
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.
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.
