tutorial How to convert 7z/APE ps1 games to CUE/BIN format

[MobCat]

How to convert 7z/APE ps1 games to CUE/BIN format
(Oh yeah for windows, sorry )

So I don't know abort you but I have come across this file format a few times in my travels and it's super annoying, no emulators I know abort even know what to do with it and the one that dose doesn't do a very good job and you can't burn this mess to a disk and use it on a real PlayStation so lets fix it.
I also did my best to keep the rambling to a minimum but I failed a little in the middle of this tutorial...

First up we are going to need to download and install a few things, so I made a care package.

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, it's recommend if for some reason you don't have this installed to go and download the up to date one
(You could at a pinch open the 7z with WinRAR but I wouldn't recommend it)

Once you have that download and unpacked the only thing we are going to have to install is "MAC_416 (Monkey Audio).exe"

Now with that out of the we can go to our game we want to convert and open up it's 7z file with 7Zip
There should be a file in there named something like track01.bin.ecm we want to extract that file and put it with our ape file
 
After that is done you can delete the 7z file as we don't need it anymore
 

Now in your care package you should see a copy of NO$PSX v2.0 you want to drag'n'drop our .bin.ecm to the NO$PSX.EXE
(Any copy of NO$PSX should be good for this if you already have a copy installed somewhere you can use that but it was just easier to include a copy)

You should get a popup about decoding the ecm file, you can just click the Decompress button. You can also check the Delete .ECM after decompression if you want as we don't need it anymore but that's up to you

Once NO$PSX is done decompressing the ECM file, NO$PSX will load the game just "fine" and if the game only has one bin file then it will play fine but we still need a CUE file for reasons and if it's a multi track game like MK3 then you will have no game music. Once NO$PSX boots the game you can close it

Now we have one nice generic normal BIN file on to fix the rest

Ok now we can open up Monkey's Audio we installed earlier and go to File -> Add File(s)... or press Ctrl+F

Now find the APE files in the game director we are working in and select ALL of them and then press open

Then press the Decompress icon at the top left and wait for the app to decompress all the APE files

After Monkey's Audio has finished processing the audio you can close the program and you will find we will have a mess of APE and WAV files

A simple way to fix this in windows 7 at least is go up to the search thingy and type *.ape and hit enter this will filter all the APE files and we can select all of them and delete them
PLEASE IF YOU DO THIS IN ANOTHER OS PLEASE MAKE SURE YOUR SEARCHING IN JUST THE GAME FOLDER YOU WORKING IN RIGHT NOW, DON'T GO DELETING ALL THE APE FILES ON YOUR COMPUTER PLEASE

Now we have a bunch of WAV files and one BIN files so now it's time for "WAV to BIN.exe". Simply just drag'n'drop all the WAV files to the WAV to BIN.exe app and that will do it's thing and convert all WAV files to BIN and delete the WAV files when its done.

Now we should have a bunch of BIN files but no CUE file

And the truth is unless you have the original disk there is no good way to make a CUE file from scratch.
An overview of what a CUE file is, it's more or less a index file, it tells the program that is loading this CD image what BIN file to play when. This is sorta a left over from audio CDs where each BIN file is a new piece of music and this is the same thing but track01 is the game data and the rest of the tracks / BIN files is the game music. This is why a emulator will play the game fine but wont load any music, as with out that CUE file it wont know what each BIN file is, where to find them or when to play them and without the original disk neither do you, so that's where the "cues and sbis.zip" file comes into place and why this tutorial only works for PlayStation games. This zip made by some really nice people I wish I could credit contains to my knowledge all the CUE files for all the PlayStation games and it's soo small because as I said there just index files so there just a few lines of text for each file but befoul all of that I may of made a small over sight that we are going to fix right now.
(From memory sbins are for the anti mod-chip protection stuff and if your game has them then we will be extracting them but we wont be covering what they do today, just keep in mind you wont be able to burn one of these game to a disk and play it on a real console unless the disk is patched to remove the anti mod-chip stuff, if you boot the disk up in a emulator most patched games will have a boot screen telling you so... or just not boot at all because some patched games have a NTSC PAL switcher in there boot screen and some emulators don't know what to do with that and just wont show any video)

So we are going to need the games ID number in this and most cases it's at the end of the file name see [SCES-00060] we need that for the cues and sbis.zip.
If you don't have that then we need to find it and the best way of doing that is to open up or mount the Track01 BIN file with your disk image editor of choice, i'm using UltraISO

Now if your lucky the disk title in this case at the top left should be the game id replace the _ with a - and your right to go, but if not or to just double check in the root of the disk image there should be a file starting with SCES, SCUS, SLPS followed by a _ then three numbers then a . and then two more numbers. Replace the _ like befoul are remove the . and bam game id now with that small over sight time to open the cues and sbis.zip

Now we want to find our game with it's matching game id in this zip file
I have also just realized that the cues zip file i included only has PAL (E) games -____-' if i can fix this i will and ill update the post with a new care package i am really sorry about this...

Well once you have found your game with matching game id number open up the folder and extract or drag'n'drop the CUE file in the same folder as all of your BIN files

And we are almost done just one last sanity check. Open up the CUE file you just extracted with a text editor of choice I would recommend Notepad++ and check to see if all the BIN files you have are the same BIN files  in the CUE file and the CUE file has the right amount of BIN files you have in it.

If there are a mismatch try checking your game id is right and have another look through the zip file to see if you for the right one. if the amount of BIN files match just with different names for example missing the game id i would recommend naming your BIN files to the same filenames as the files listed in the CUE file. You could re-wright the CUE file to match your BIN files but that's way to easy to mess up its formatting and then end up with loading issues.

And with that sorta long tutorial over you should now have some nice normal CUE/BIN files you can now play in any ps1 emulator or burn to a disk and play on a real console
Let be know if you run into any issues in the comments below and ill try and help you out

Edited May 1, 2021 by MobCat
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[RyouBakura]

Man, just reading this takes me back to quite some time ago.

Thanks for the tutorial, I love it.

[Ilham Nurjaman]

thank for infomation

[eolvera85]

Excelent...  just what i need

[Fahad007008]

good information