(Reposted and adapted from a thread I made on Reddit a month ago.)
What is CHD?
.chd is a lossless compression format. It’ll allow you to better preserve things like audio while still saving 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, so here’s my attempt to lend a hand.
Disclaimer: I’m not a coder, I just took the time to hunt down some instructions on various 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!!_. Unfortunately if something doesn’t work, I probably won’t be able to help much.
Anyhoo, here’s how I did it.
——
First I installed Homebrew to my Mac by opening terminal and typing in:
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
It prompted me for my admin password. I typed it out and pressed enter, but didn’t see anything happen. No worries. It worked anyway.
It then asked me if I wanted to install, I hit enter to approve and waited it out.
When finished, I typed out:
brew install rom-tools
At first it failed because I am a proud owner of an apple silicon Mac, so I dug up this fix, which was mentioned in this stackedoverflow thread.
While still in terminal, type:
cd /opt/homebrew/bin/
enter, then:
export PATH=$PATH:/opt/homebrew/bin
enter, then:
cd ~/
enter, then:
touch .zshrc
enter, then:
echo export PATH=$PATH:/opt/homebrew/bin >> .zshrc
enter.
After that, I was able to finally install rom-tools, which includes CHDMAN: (Same as before…)
brew install rom-tools
At this point I was ready to convert bin/cue files to CHD, and this is how I do 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 I ran it for the first time, MacOS asked me 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 Mac’s Downloads folder and this script just found and converted them in all the same directory.
If I want to convert .iso files instead of bin/cue, I just 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.
Good luck!
I’m happy that the effort pays off for others as well as myself.