StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Can anyone recomend a good (and free) virtual cd drive program for windows xp? I'm really tired of No-CD cracks and/or drive swapping hell.

Things I want:

* Support for at least a few virtual drives so I can mount a few iso's for the games I play the most.
* Something small and simple -- I just want to load an ISO and go.

Things I don't want:

* Spyware
* Shareware /w expirations

I see tons from a google search, but I'd rather use soemthing off a recomendation to avoid gotchas

Miles Teg

I use PowerISO.

It's been good for me so far.

Lovely. Fear won't run with a Virtual CD drive. Fucking bastards treating their customers like criminals.

It will if you use a PROPER soft, like Daemon Tools 4. It's entire purpose is to defeat copy protection, and I can say from experience that FEAR works fine from an image. Frankly, it's easier to crack it, but anyway. 1-4 drives, loads anything but FUCKING POWERISO COMPRESSED BULLSHIT, defeats everything even middling Starforce. Only soft worth using anywhere ever.

I have to second Stark's recommendation. Daemon Tools is exactly what you're looking for, since it supports up to 4 virtual drives, and it is a simple background task with a systems tray icon to access the image file loading/unloading, "ejecting" the disc tray, copy protection emulation, and other options.

Warning when using Deamon Tools: NEVER select 'Unmount All Volumes'. It means that quite literally: all your drives will be unmounted, including C:\, causing your computer to crash and burn.

I learned this the hard way _twice_ (don't ask).

What?! How'd they fuck that up? I'm running 3.47 now, and "Unmount All Drives" certainly does not unmount any of the actual drives, just the virtual drives.

Ein, that's rubbish. I just used 'unmount all volumes' ten seconds ago - it just disconnects the images. That's all.

U235 needs DT4. They finally, finally updated it.

It did it to me. Maybe the new version fixed that little oopsie...

I've been using DT since ... well... always. All millenium. Since v3.28. It's never happened to me. You must have all the luck.

Been using Daemon Tools for a good five years here and I've NEVER seen what you described Ein.

http://www.daemon-tools.cc/

I don't know if they defeat copy protection, as I've never tried to mount game disc images, but I use both the both the Nero ImageDrive app that comes with the Nero suite and the Alcohol Soft virtual drive with no problems whatsoever.

Alcohol's virtual drives are licenced tech from the Daemon Tools people. They are basicly one and the same. It is also the reason that the free Daemon Tools will never have more then 4 possible images mounted at the same time.

What version have they licensed? I've found the alchohol drives a pain in the ass and a failure when it comes to copy protection.

I blame Gandalf. This thread would be three posts long if he hadn't suggested some powerISO devil-software.

Einhander Sn0m4n wrote:Warning when using Deamon Tools: NEVER select 'Unmount All Volumes'. It means that quite literally: all your drives will be unmounted, including C:\, causing your computer to crash and burn.

I learned this the hard way _twice_ (don't ask).

Let me guess. After the first time you thought, "hell that was just a fluke!"

Einhander Sn0m4n wrote:Warning when using Deamon Tools: NEVER select 'Unmount All Volumes'. It means that quite literally: all your drives will be unmounted, including C:\, causing your computer to crash and burn.

I learned this the hard way _twice_ (don't ask).

You know, wouldn't Windows actually prevent the system partition from being unmounted? Unless Daemon Tools completely bypasses a check.

Christ. It DOESN'T HAPPEN. It's never happened to ANYONE ELSE. Bah. People who use virtual drive softs that aren't DT4 are fooling themselves!

Stark wrote:What version have they licensed? I've found the alchohol drives a pain in the ass and a failure when it comes to copy protection.

I honestly don't know, but presumably they aren't trailing by more then a release or two considering that last I checked, they were still licencing the stuff.

Alternativly, they only had a licence for the 3.x version, and not the 4.x (which is a complete rewrite).

Yeah, a rewrite that took bloody years. 3.47 was the standard for ages.

mmar wrote:Alcohol's virtual drives are licenced tech from the Daemon Tools people. They are basicly one and the same. It is also the reason that the free Daemon Tools will never have more then 4 possible images mounted at the same time.

You get as many drives as you want if you pay for the full version.