Edit: I’m going to leave this here, but fyi this tutorial is also in a magazine I created on Kbin for Retroid users. (!retroid@kbin.social)

NOTE: I joined Lemmy yesterday and this is my very first post. It is a guide I made for r/retroid on reddit. I’m migrating it here because I might be removing my post history from reddit soon and I think this guide should be kept around. Since I’m new to Lemmy, if there’s something I’m doing poorly with regards to posting, don’t hesitate to let me know so I can improve.

Disclaimer: I’m not a coder, I just took the time to hunt down some instructions on various [reddit] threads and put them together. Feel free to comment if you have a better method. (Better yet, if anyone knows how to somehow turn this into a handy-dandy Siri shortcut, that would be outstanding!!)

.chd is a lossless compression format. It can better preserve the quality of things like audio while still saving a lot of storage space. There are tools available on Windows that will allow you to compress bin/cue and iso files to chd easily, but not so much on Mac at the moment, so here’s my attempt to lend a hand until there is.

Anyhoo, here’s the guide.

——

Install Homebrew to your Mac by opening terminal and typing in the following:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

It’ll prompt for your admin password. Just type it out and press enter. I didn’t see anything get typed out, but it worked anyway.

It’ll ask you if you want to install, so hit enter to approve and wait it out.

When finished, type out:

brew install rom-tools

If it fails, it’s because (congratulations!) you are a proud owner of an apple silicon Mac! Try this fix (which was mentioned in this thread. )

While still in terminal, type:

cd /opt/homebrew/bin/

enter, then:

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/homebrew/bin

enter, then:

cd ~/

enter, then:

touch .zshrc

enter, then:

echo export PATH=$PATH:/opt/homebrew/bin >> .zshrc

enter. You should be able to install rom-tools now, which includes CHDMAN: (Same as before…)

brew install rom-tools

Now you should be ready to convert bin/cue files to CHD, and this is how I did it.

In terminal, run this script (which I pulled from an old reddit thread):

#!/bin/bash echo "Will proccess files on directory: $1" cd $1 for i in */*.cue; do chdman createcd -i "$i" -o "${i%.*}.chd"; done echo "All done"

When you run it for the first time, MacOS will ask you for permissions to a bunch of directories. I just said “yeah man, I wanna do it”, and gave it carte blanch. I had a bunch of bin/cue files in my Downloads folder and this script just found and converted them in the same directory.

If you want to convert .iso files, run the same script but use “.iso” instead of “.cue”

——

Platforms I know that can use CHD files on retroid include PS1, PS2, Sega CD, Saturn, and Dreamcast. I hope this guide works for you.

Good luck!