First post, by General P. Error
Hiho! I own about a cubic metre of old Windows-games on CD/DVD. Most of them require the CD to be in the drive when playing, some for to read extra-data, others for a rudimentary copy-protection. So by now my living room was messed up with half-rotten "Jewel-cases". As i do'nt want to end up on a plastic dump, i found out how to put the data on hd and shovel all the CDs into the cellar:
1. Make the CD/DVD virtual: All you need is a CD-burner app like nero (i use crdtfe, but any other .iso-writer should do) and some .img-mounter (like WinCDEmu). Open your CD with Explorer, drag & drop the data on your new CD-image, make sure to name the CD/DVD like the original, "burn" the MyNewCD.img to hd. Now you can throw away the CD.
2. This is only half the way, because mounting the new image won't help = the game still searches its CD in your physical drive. Here comes the trick: Change your system settings from first-physical-CD-drive = d:\ (an example) to e:\ (just one letter up, so that the first letter after hd-volume(s) is blank = from abcd_ to abc_e). Now, when mounting the .iso, it automatically becomes the first available CD-drive (d:\) and the game thinks it is for real.
At last you may want to make a batch file for a) mounting b) running c) un-mounting and we're all happy. Ah, make sure that there is no other app and/or network on your system that gets confused when your CD/DVD-drive has a new letter...
As a side-effect, old CD-apps which have to be in the first drive (as .iso) can now be run directly. For example there is DeLorme Global Explorer from 1993 or DeLorme Street Atlas 1.0 from 1991(!). Both work now directly under XP, without having to use DOSBox & Win 3.1. Afaik, this should work for Win 7 & 10, too = 30yo software without emulator!
Maybe there are games with some "hard" copy-protection that fail and/or need some fine-tunig (raw image), but i tried this out with several CDs/DVDs and standard settings = "Joliet" and "track at once" worked.
