Don, one of my newsletter readers, wrote about having to load the original CDROM into his computer every timehe wanted to play a game:
I have Tiger Woods golf 2003 and have loaded it onto my computer. If I want to play the game, I must put the Courses disk into the drive and then the game will begin.
Since my Laptop has an external drive, I dislike carrying it around with me when I travel. I very seldom use it unless I am loading software. I remember hearing somewhere that if I copied the complete set of 3 disks to my HD, then it could run off there when it required the Courses disk. “However”, obviously I am doing something wrong as this doesn’t work as it still asks for the Courses disk. Is it possible to overcome this problem for me? Thank you.
Don [last name removed]
As I told Don, various CD Emulation software packages can solve this (do a Google Search for “cd emulation software” and you will find a number of them). These work by making CD disk images and mounting them as if they were additional drives. Sometimes, in order to make the software work, you have to that first and then install the software from that image — e.g., if the software makes a note of which drive letter was used for the cdrom (hopefully they don’t do that any more).
I had some CD emulation software under Win98 and was pretty happy with it, except for one program which had 10 CDs. Anyway, that version broke with XP and the software company wanted a signficant upgrade price — I declined.
I’ve read about “Alcohol 120%” CD emulation software, at http://www.alcohol-soft.com/. They have a 30 day trial version. Their system lets you set up up to 31 “disk drives” of CD disk images. I have not used it, though.
I saw Don the following Saturday at our computer club — he said that he tried Alcohol 120% and it solved his problem. Cool.
I don’t normally run programs that require me to reinsert my original CDs, not from any particular aversion to such programs (although that style of copy protection is a pain in the neck), but just because the programs I use do not require them.. Also, my normal computer is my Dell 8600 notebook, which already is a dual-boot Windows XP Pro / Xandros Linux dual-boot machine, so I am restrictive about installing big files on the notebook’s hard drive
Maybe I’ll give CD emulation software a try again — for my wife’s computer.
and