I guess you can use Nero DriveSpeed or ideally use an image of the cdrom.

I can't think of any recent PC games that actually use the CDROM for gaming. Nowadays the CD's install everything to the hard drive and just use a CD check on startup, whereas alot of DOS CDROM games would actually use the files on the CDROM to save disk space.

I think smartdrv for MS-DOS could cache CDROM data....not sure how effective that really was since I barely ever used smartdrv back then.

Ah okay.. so basically you don't know of any of the DosBox mount cdrom parameters that might fix/help the issue?

IMGMOUNT

The rule for just about every CD game in Dosbox is: make a CD image. There's several reasons for this:

a) no need to swap CDs
b) hard drives are more than big enough today - mine holds over 600 CD images at the moment
c) MUCH faster loading and installing times
d) better compatibility
e) CD audio doesn't always work properly with a real CD

Just use UltraISO or other similar software to make a bin/cue file (NOT ISO - less compatibility & no CD audio + ISO may rename some files on the CD) and then use imgmount to mount the image.

red_avatar wrote:

Just use UltraISO or other similar software to make a bin/cue file (NOT ISO - less compatibility & no CD audio + ISO may rename some files on the CD) and then use imgmount to mount the image.

Yes, image files are the way to go. I don't think it's possible to completely eliminate spin up/spin down in modern CD/DVD drives, as this functionality is integrated into the drive's firmware. Tools like Nero Speed will only set the maximum spin speed for compatible drives, but the drive will probably still spin down after some time.

I disagree with some of RA's suggestions, though. "Cheap" ISO tools like UltraISO or MagicISO won't always create proper images, from my experience. The best way to create BIN/CUE is by using CDRWin or CloneCD, IMO. You'll only need BIN/CUE for games with audio tracks. For all other games, ISO is fine, and will save you some disk space. An ISO image is an ISO image, after all - no files or file names "inside" the image will be altered during the dumping proccess if the dumping software is working correctly.

It's also possible to simply copy all files from the CD to a directory and mount that dir using the standard DOSBox "mount" command with the "-t cdrom" option. I'm playing most of my games using that technique, and it works very well. For many multi-disc games, it's even possible to copy the contents of all media to a single directory, thus eliminating disc swap completely. It's possible to delete unneeded files, too, like for example demos of other games, etc. (as DOS games were relatively small, the CD's are often filled with other stuff). When not playing the game for some time, you can compress the "virtual CD directory" with RAR or ZIP, and uncompress it again when you want to play the game. I have many of these archives on DVD, so when i want to play the game, i simply pop in the DVD, uncompress the archive to a fixed location on my hd, and start the game. An archive like that will be much more compact than a zipped/rarred up image, because it's compressed on a per-file basis.