Quick SEGA CD question

dogeymon

So frustrating. Sega CD is my favorite system and they won't play!

So I got a hold of the games. Looked for ones that came as BIN/CUE packages. Got a game.

Unzipped it. I noticed it had a CUE file and a BIN file......except the BIN file ends in bin.ecm

What's ecm? Something bad I guess because the games wouldn't load. Just went to a dark screen. So on Finder, on my mac, I just selected the BIN file and deleted the ecm on the end so that the file ended in bin. Now the game loads up in SEGA CD emulator, except the game won't start. It just goes to the CD player......I see the tracks and everything but no selection to start the game.

What am I still doing wrong? :(

space cadet

Maybe a bad rom file? Sega cd works great for me.

mitu

@dogeymon just because you removed the .egm extension doesn't mean it will work. The .bin files are referenced from the .cue file (which is just a plain text file), changing the extension for the .bin files will break the .cue file.

Make sure you follow the guide at https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Sega-CD/ and add the proper CD files (.bin/.cue).

HurricaneFan

ECM extension is a compressed bin file, so you need to uncompress it using software that works on your mac. Google ECM to bin and try to follow the directions you find. An easier approach is to search for your roms on a different site and download ones that aren't ECM compressed.

akafox

It is my understanding that the ecm format is for psx games only. The ecm format is designed to remove a lot of information from the psx image because of how the anti- piracy was baked into the disc and bios. Sony write the disc with errors that way when you tried to copy it your drive (at the time) would try to correct them automatically...the psx bios sees a "fixed disc" and thus will not boot the disc.
Thus doing this makes it smaller..and then compressing it makes it even smaller.

Anyway what I am saying is that you may have a psx image NOT a sega cd image. I could be wrong. HurruicaneFan is correct though. it is all over the web out how to do this. When you get it unpacked and have a clean bin file and if it still will not load try it as a psx game and see it it loads..I'm thinking it will.