Creating a fake drive

Steel · Post by **Steel** » 2006-07-29 04:48am

Im trying to create a fake drive so i can play an old game without the cd

I have tried using a

SUBST Z: C:\LOCATION_OF_CDFILES_ON_DISK

command

But that only creates a normal drive there, and the game doesnt recognise it as the cd being there, even though you can install from there fine

Anyone know of a way to get this to work. I know there are programmes that can make a game stop using its cd, but i think you need certain files for those to work and the games i want to use this for are so old that they probably wont exist. Is there a way to do this, or is there something that can make a fake cd drive on my HD?

Faram · Post by **Faram** » 2006-07-29 04:50am

Try Deamontools.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-07-29 04:52am

1) Trust me, any regardless of age probably has cracks. I remember 1.44Mb apps with dozens of cracks, downloaded from BBSs'... ahh....

2) Have you tried using something like Daemon Tools mount it as a virtual cd drive?

3)... er, I forgot why I was using numbers. You can create fake drives by mapping to locations, but I don't think that'll fool copy protection. What's the game?

Steel · Post by **Steel** » 2006-07-29 05:42am

I dont think copy protection is an issue, so if i can manually map a cd drive to somewhere that would be a good solution

I dont actually have image files of the cds, i have the cds themselves, so how to i go about mounting those with something like daemon tools?

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-07-29 05:48am

Use MagicISO or Nero or something to put the files on an image, then mount it. Does the game play off the CD? Older games often have a .ini file that allows you to change where it looks for resources (ie, D:\) to a HDD folder (ie, C:\games\gamex\cd\).

Steel · Post by **Steel** » 2006-07-29 07:00am

MagicISO seems to work, but is there any way to get round the 300mb limit without paying?

Unfortunatley none of the games i want to do this with have an ini file i can edit to do that(, and installing them from a mounted drive wont make them look there, they still look at one of the cd drives)

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-07-29 08:21am

Really? The only game I had problems with like that was Fragile Allegiance, and moving the data from the CD to an image and using Daemon Tools worked fine. Also, you can circumvent the 300Mb thing by opening an existing .iso, removing everything, then adding the stuff you want and 'saving' instead of 'save as'. Works for me, anyway.

If you list the games, I can share my experience: many older games either have replacement exes, dosbox settings, or third-party patches that make these things work.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2006-07-29 11:02am

Microsoft has the Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for download if you don't need to worry about copy protection.

CDBurnerXP is a freeware CD burner application and may also have facilities to rip ISOs.