To my best knowledge, there is no such virtual drive for DOS. Fakecd and the likes can only simulate single session discs, not CD-EXTRA or mixed-mode CD. You need Win9x for that, and Daemon Tools/Alcohol etc. - whatever you judge to be best (compatible and low footprint)

Virtual Clonedrive works in Win98 - and is free, but I'm not sure if all of the games will run in 98. For DOS, the closest I can find are
SHSUCDX: a replacement for MSCDEX. v3.02
SHSUCDHD: emulates a CD-ROM using an image file. v3.01

I think this setup only supports ISO files, but perhaps this will cover some of the titles.

I tried burning a few cue/bin images from GOG.com games with limited success. I bought 10 CD-RW discs as you can just erase them if something goes wrong 😀

That's the theory, but in my experience CD-RW and DVD-RW discs have a nasty habit of not working correctly after even just the first couple of write-erase cycles. I never really figured out why.

i guess the brand is important 😉

Why worry about failed burns when the blanks are as cheap as they are? Besides, coasters are a lot more rare than they used to be.

Well, there are always cases of user error in which the wrong thing has been burned, or burned in the wrong way – but really, we're getting off-topic here.

There is indeed no way that I know of to play CD-audio from a mixed-mode CD image in DOS, or at least not at the same time as something else; it would require too much sophisticated interaction with the sound card.

Convert the image to ISO and use SHSUCDHD. If you need the audio tracks then burn it to a CD, there is no way (yet) to play digital CD audio in DOS.

jwt27 wrote:

there is no way (yet) to play digital CD audio in DOS.

Well, there is, just not from an image. (And while something could feasibly play the audio tracks from an image, it wouldn't be able to run at the same time as something else.)