# Chdman - Question about converting game with multiple bin files



## tmnr1992 (Feb 3, 2020)

I noticed that Chdman can convert games in .bin format that have multiple tracks, but when I extract that game from .chd back to .bin the game comes out as a single .bin file. The game still works, but my question is: does the the game lose any kind of information when this process happens?


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## lucks (Feb 18, 2020)

Nope, you can even merge the bins if you want less files.


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## tmnr1992 (Feb 18, 2020)

lucks said:


> Nope, you can even merge the bins if you want less files.



I see, in the case of dreamcast the games break after converting to chd, if I convert those chd back to bin they still don't work, unless i replace the .cue file with a .gdi file befoce converting to chd, but then turning those chd back to bin give me some .raw files instead, so is there a way to convert dreamcast games to chd but being able toaconvert them back to working bin files?


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## lucks (Feb 20, 2020)

I use chds for dreamcast and everything else (where supported), maybe you are using an old chdman or your bins are not valid.
Chd is lossless, you get what you had, so something is wrong in your bins or chdman.
Latest version is v5.


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## tmnr1992 (Feb 21, 2020)

lucks said:


> I use chds for dreamcast and everything else (where supported), maybe you are using an old chdman or your bins are not valid.
> Chd is lossless, you get what you had, so something is wrong in your bins or chdman.
> Latest version is v5.



I'm using Chdman v5 and the bin is from redump, I've searched a bit and it seems this is a common issue for dreamcast games, I still find it strange that the game breaks after compressing to chd and reconverting to bin when the process is lossles.


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## lucks (Feb 24, 2020)

Is the bin the same as the original bin?
If not, maybe chdman is skipping some parts.
I know that redump dumps are using a new dump method since last year that needs to be supported, maybe chdman has no support for this yet.
In this case you should convert them to an "old" format and use that with chdman or open an issue in their git.


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## blindseer (Feb 24, 2020)

You should be able to extract the tracks from the bin using the program called cdmage, atleast for ps1 games with multitrack it works, sadly I don't have any dreamcast games to test it on.


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## Dimensional (Mar 21, 2020)

This is actually a known flaw with chdman. The program does this with all cd images with multiple tracks separated into their own bin files. When it extracts the data, it keeps the tracks in the same file. To resolve this, you'll have to get a third party program to split the files. I've recently tested a python 3 script that seems to work perfectly.

I've gone as far as ripped one of my PSX games, confirmed it was redump identical, then using chdman, compressed and then decompressed the files, and using the script I'll link at the bottom of this post, was able to create identical track files that matched with MD5, SHA1, and SHA256 checksums to the original dump. I even used it to merge them back together, and the result was identical to the chdman extracted output.

https://github.com/putnam/binmerge


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