So I'm leveraging Daemon Tools to manage the many games I'm looking to run on my Windows 98 laptop. Some DOS games (like Daggerfall and Battlespire) play nice with this set up, remembering the drive letter of the install disc and just working. Other games (like Descent 2, Descent to Undermountain, Screamer) all seem to look for a CD in my laptop's physical CD-ROM drive regardless of what drive I am running setup or the game from. They seem to just kinda default to the 1 real drive.

I've done some digging into setting up CD-ROM drives in MS-DOS, but most pages I've found don't really discuss how Windows 98 is setting up drives for the MS-DOS environment or details about the drive configuration that would suggest how these problematic games are determining which drive to look at (is it some sort of ordering based on which driver was loaded first or something?). What I THINK I want is to some how set up a .PIF for these games in Windows to alter now the CD-ROM drives are being exposed to the MS-DOS environment such that my virtual drives are being preferred when doing data seeks. FWIW, the virtual drives ARE present in MS-DOS. I can CD to them, other games can read audio and data from them.

Does anyone have any wisdom for how I could make this work?