There is SHSUCDHD, you could try that.

I also found a reference to "VIRTUAL CDROM", but no download site.

Captain Breakout wrote:

don't seem to work

This is not a helpful phrase in troubleshooting. Can you be more precise as to what happens?

I'd use Daphne, but this is a Dos-based (not Dosbox but actual MS-Dos 7) machine

I kind of thought there were DOS builds of Daphne, but I'm probably mis-remembering.

Anyway, if the game uses redbook CD audio, then there is pretty much no way to get it working in DOS with sound, if at all.

Jorpho wrote:

I kind of thought there were DOS builds of Daphne, but I'm probably mis-remembering.

I thought they were Windows command-line executables and not DOS, but I may be misremembering too 😀

Jorpho... yes I agree actually. Should have been more specific. The game terminated after a language selection screen with a DOS message that said something like "ASSERTION FAILED:" and then listed a video file from the CD (which was the first video scene in the game). Then crashed back to dos, occaionally a fatal error depending on what CD-tricking software I was using.

In any case... SHSUCDHD solved the problem! Thanks idspispopd! Wow... I'd never heard of this utility before! ISO's as CD-ROMs in DOS... wow, what possibilities!!! Plus an unloadable CD-Driver. Just excellent!!! 😊

Anyway, yeah redbook was brought up. Fortunately this version of Dragon's Lair doesn't use Redbook (all the video and audio is contained in files in some weird 1993 codec -didn't investigate more than that).

I got the whole game to run with a fairly long bat file and the shsucdhd utilities within a menu system. If anyone is interested I'll post the bat file here.

Oddly enough, the shsucdhd program seems to affect my Ultimarc I-PAC hardware. Talk about obscure, but occasionally when I run it it cuts off my external pass-through keyboard (but not my arcade controls), and I have to cold boot to get my keyboard back. I expect this might only be useful to pretty much nobody but me, but I thought I'd report that here.

Anyway, happy happy to have Dragons Lair running on my arcade cabinet now. Thanks for the help and suggestions!

(Musing:) Hopefully I can try to keep myself from adding a ton of Turbo and Neo CDs to my emulator system, now that there seems a way to do it without an actual CD. Sheesh, probably Redbook won't work on them and that would be a shame, still... tempting!

I have this same version of Dragons lair that uses file formats (weird 1993 codec) same with my space ace. If you want to run this off the HDD, in dos make a directory you want to put the game in, once in the directory use the copy x command like this without quotes "COPY D:\*.*" and press enter, Please note "D" is the cd-rom drive letter which may be different in your system. it will take some time to copy the files but well worth it these games run great off HDD. After the files are copied run the game from HDD directory just like you would off CD I hope this works for you.

stuvize wrote:

I have this same version of Dragons lair that uses file formats (weird 1993 codec) same with my space ace. If you want to run this off the HDD, in dos make a directory you want to put the game in, once in the directory use the copy x command like this without quotes "COPY D:\*.*" and press enter, Please note "D" is the cd-rom drive letter which may be different in your system. it will take some time to copy the files but well worth it these games run great off HDD. After the files are copied run the game from HDD directory just like you would off CD I hope this works for you.

Send you a PM , thanks

I'm still pretty sure the Readysoft release has *nothing* to do with DAPHNE the emulator though 😉