Pool of Radiance dos version has a built-in backdoor to bypass the codewheel check. You add "<space>STING" after the st.exe in order to activate it. So you can change your start.bat to look like this to bypass the codewheel check.
conf
if errorlevel 1 goto :End
st STING
:End
cls
Obviously if you just run st.exe to run the game then just change that to.
st STING
Curse of the Azure Bonds also has a bypass, it's start.exe STING Wooden (that's start.exe(space)STING(space)Wooden capitalized exactly that way.
Also if you are using the Collectors edition of the game, it's very buggy on installing and saving the games. Playing the games from the cdrom is known to cause the save game corruption. Where the last character is saved in all the character slots. To prevent that, install the games to the HD and start and play them from there.
Whether you run the game from the cdrom or install it to the HD. It doesn't name the game or save game directories correctly. So you need to fix them by hand before trying to play them. You'll know you have the problem because it will ask for disk 3 when you try to load a save game. And you will not be able to load or save characters either. An example of a working directory and pool.cfg settings.
(working directory structure)
C:\WIZWORX\POOLRAD
C:\WIZWORX\POOLRAD\SAVE
(working pool.cfg setting)
E
P
C:\WIZWORX\POOLRAD\
C:\WIZWORX\POOLRAD\SAVE\
N
By default the Collectors edition will install POR to a \WIZWORKS\ directory stucture which will not work. So rename it as shown above to \WIZWORX\ . I'll try to post the link for the original Wizworks help page where I found most of the information provided above. Wizworks and it's site doesn't exist anymore, so you have to access an archive of it from the web archive project.
http://web.archive.org/web/19990921040940/htt … h/ad&dhelp.html
I wish I had found it earlier myself. I had tried to get this collection working on and off a number of times over the years, with no success. And now I am happily half way through Pool of Radiance once again. (edited to correct a non-working instruction above)