How to convert an ECM file to BIN

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I will show the use of ECM file and will also give a tutorial on how to convert it to any usable format like BIN


Updated links: November 2022

I was browsing a PSX game site and downloaded a game from there and got a ECM file, that was the first time i saw an ECM file, I researched about it and was able to convert it to a working BIN file, the original ECM file was 200MB and when the file was converted into BIN it went to 600MB in size, so you can imagine how powerful is this ECM system.

ECM files are used to compress files and folders from a CD or CD image, it's very powerful and can compress a CD image to 200MB from 600MB, isn't it great ? So, many people compress their file to ECM and upload it to internet to save space and bandwidth. But the file can't be open by a Disk Burning or CD image converting programs like Nero, MagicISO etc. They are only to burn files of CD images type like ISO,CDZ,BIN etc.
So read this post to know how to open it.  

What is an ECM file?

ECM stands for Error Code Modeler , it compresses files and save huge amount of space, most of the CD/DVD have unnecessary EDC/ECC data in them and takes lots of space on the drive, ECM only adds the data in the compress file, and thus the file size changes, the compression size depends on unnecessary EDC/ECC data on the CD. Compressing a CD image to ECM is easy, just open the CD image file into your favorite compression program and save the file as [filename.bin].ecm, just add ECM at end.

How to convert ECM to BIN?

Ok, let's get back to the main thing, but read the above contents as well, we were at 'How to convert ECM to BIN' or any other readable/burnable file format, because we can't burn an ECM file to a CD so we need to convert it to use it. 

The procedure is small, it's just a 2 minute job. To make it easy to understand for you, i will list step-by-step procedures, please read them carefully.
  1. First of all we have to download a file, with which we will convert the ECM file to a BIN file, it's not a good looking program but works great, thanks to Neil Corlett for this program. I have set a password to extract files from the RAR file, the password is stramaxon.
    Download File [LINK 1 | LINK 2] - Password for the file: stramaxon
  2. Now extract the RAR file with WinRAR program, it will ask for a password, just enter "stramaxon" in the password field (without quotes)
  3. Open the ecm100 folder in the extracted folder there will be two files, unecm.exe and ecm.exe
  4. Open the folder where your ECM file is, now drag and drop the ECM file on unecm.exe in the ecm100 folder
    A similar window may pop-up when you drag and drop the ECM file into the unecm.exe, wait for it to decode 100%.
  5. Once it's 100% completed, the cmd windows will close, now check the folder where tje ECM file was, a BIN file will be created. And done !
We have successfully converted the ECM file to an burnable image file BIN. If you want to change the BIN file to other CD image file, you can do it by burning the BIN file on a CD and then making image file from that CD, I know that will be easy for you, but if you don't know how to do it then please request me a tutorial on depy45631@gmail.com