this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Those no-disc patches can be sketchy and infected, so watch out!
My preferred way to play games without CDs was virtual disc emulators, so you can store a copy of your game disc on your hard drive, and virtually pop that game's CD image into the virtual drive in when you want to play that specific game.
One good trick with these, is that you don't even need a full copy of the disc: There was some trick to creating a very small disc image that just has enough information to get past the game's copy protection, but it's been well over 2 decades since I did any of that, so you'll have to do your own research.
As someone pointed out, gamecopyworld used to have mini iso files for that purpose. They had a guide on how to make your own mini iso as well.
There used to be a site I looked at a few years back that I don't recall the name of, but it definitely felt a little sketchy. Same with the one file I downloaded. Set off Windows Defender real quick and that told me to stay away from that site.
Definitely gonna have to look in virtual disc emulating them. I have a virtual disc drive program on my desktop, so I could look into trying to make that work. That, or I'll try and find the small disc image thing you brought up to save space while trying to make that vde thing work.
Thanks for the info.
The full disc images worked well, and hard drive space is so cheap these days, that I'd worry about getting the virtual drive emulator working first.
WinCDEmu is FOSS, so you might look into that first.
Back in the day, I bought Alcohol 120, and it worked great.
The mini-CD image trick (optional): https://forum.daemon-tools.cc/forum/copy-methods-questions-daemon-tools/general-copy-discussion/4900-
Windows can natively mount an iso as a drive since Win 10 at least, maybe before.
But thanks for the link, always good to have options!