Just make backup copies and play from those (now explicitly allowed by law in the UK).

I'd rather just play it from virtual cd's instead of having to hear that evil cdrom spinning noise 😀

I'm not using Dosbox. I'm using physical hardware, circa 1996

Lack of care for CD-ROM drives will damage discs. Games do not discriminate this behavior.

that said, the day my CDs stopped scratching so much is the day I stopped using MITSUMI CD-ROM drives

Depending on your drive, there's always a risk of scratching the disks. I had a high-speed plextor drive that tore up discs like nobody's business. Imaging the discs, and running them in some type of virtual drive is the way to go.

Besides, CD-ROMs are notorious for "cd-rot" as they get older. They're gonna fail eventually, so go ahead and image them now, while they're still readable.

dosquest wrote:

I'm not using Dosbox. I'm using physical hardware, circa 1996

That's no reason not to use disc images (unless the game uses CD-audio music)

Best of both worlds.

Image original disc.
Store in safe place.
Either use image or burn multiple discs.

I usually Image the disk in question and burn myself a "beater copy". I do that for all my games and it works perfectly even if the disc needs to be accessed for audio or video since it is an exact copy of the original.

The only one I cannot seem to make an image of is Omikron : The Nomad Soul. It simply will not recognize it and create and image. 😒

King_Corduroy wrote:

The only one I cannot seem to make an image of is Omikron : The Nomad Soul. It simply will not recognize it and create and image. 😒

I don't own this game, but I know it's copy-protected with SafeDisc (Midtown Madness 2 and MDK 2 have the same kind of protection). Try using Alcohol 120% or CloneCD; the copy may still not work, though.

Thanks! I'll give it a try!

Im pretty sure ms-dos 6.22 can't load image files. As for making copies I'll try that.

Freedos has a cdrom driver that can mount an iso image under dos. Swapping cd's might be troublesome but then again maybe harvester just has some functionality to use a harddrive directory where you copied the cd contets to.

I tried the no cd method I figured out for dos of, it crashes when starting a new game 🙁 so there must be sme work wound that was added do dos of, because it has so much compatibility, which my plain Jane dos system doesn't have.