TechnowledgeBase

You’ve downloaded a CD image of… whatever… only to discover that it has a weird .BIN extension that your software won’t recognize. When you try opening it, you just get error messages, or the file open window won’t even recognize it as a valid CD image format.

The Problem:
Your computer doesn’t know what the hell a .BIN file is. And neither do you.

The Cause
Actually, the REAL problem is that you only downloaded part of what you need. CD images come in a lot of different formats. You find them with the ever-popular .ISO extension, but also with .NRG extensions and several others. .BIN files are just part of the crowd. But unlike ISO’s, they not complete images all by themselves. Sure, the BIN file contains all the data, but you need ANOTHER file… a CUE file… to tell your software just what data is in that BIN. Think of a BIN file as a book. The CUE file is the table of contents. In this case, however, the table of contents is stored separately from the actual…umm… content. So you should have downloaded TWO files… a CUE and a BIN… instead of just the BIN.

The Solution
Fortunately, in most cases, the CUE file is trivial to create on your own. It’s just an ordinary text file containing the filename of the BIN and a couple of lines of nerd-voodoo incantations. For example, say I downloaded a file called: “downloadedimage.bin”

I would simply create text file (with a text editor. Use Notepad, or whatever you’ve replaced it with. Not Word).
The name of that text file would be:


downloadedimage.cue.


Inside of that text file would be three lines:


FILE "downloadedimage.bin" BINARY
TRACK 01 MODE1/2352
INDEX 01 00:00:00


That’s it. Save the file and you’re done. Note that the name of the .BIN file is included on that first line. That’s important… spell it right! Of course, this assumes you’re dealing with a CD image of a DATA cd. If we were making the CUE file for a music CD, then there would be multiple TRACK and INDEX lines… one pair of lines for each track (song) on the CD. For that, you’d need to know the exact start times of each song… but that’s really a rare case. Normally you ARE dealing with a DATA CD, so the above sample is all you need.