saving cd's to hardrive

[jjoel]

i was wondering if its possible to make it so that games which require a cd can run off the hardrive without the cd i.e. saving all the cd files to the hardrive. please let me know how to do that because i've heard somewhere that it is possible. thanks

[[gr]yo]

there is a great proggy called Alcohol %120 (http://www.alcohol-software.com/download.php)
that will calm your troubles. It is a trial for 31 cd's or DVD's, so have fun

[Bumstedmans]

theres a great program out there called "game Drive." I myself do not use it, but I have a friend who does, and he's absoultely thrilled with it. It basically creates a virtual drive on your PC, and then in order to play from it, you just select the drive image from a list that you want to mount, and boom!, its working just as if you inserted it in the tray (except about 300x faster).

I think my friend found it at either Best Buy, or Sam's Club for about $10.00(us), you may be able to find it via the internet

-The Bumstedman

[saphalline]

I've heard great things about both products. I personally use A120, but that's just me. One thing I like about A120 (not sure if Game Drive does this) is that you can opt to creat an image of a game using a certain copy protection scheme, such as SecuROM 4.x/5.x. This is very useful for those games that are just a little too finicky about their cp.

Of course, in order to take advantage of this feature in A120, you'll need a really good and modern optical drive that can read the special cp data. I know that older/cheaper drives have a big problem with this.

The other problem that's been cropping up with the latest games (like Far Cry) is that the cp is so darn strong, some gamers have legitimately bought the games in a store only to have the game think it's been pirated! Apparently, some optical drives aren't even up to the challenge of running the game, much less making a hard drive copy.

Before you buy anything, check the respective websites and make sure your CD/DVD drive is good enough to make hard drive copies.

[Bumstedmans]

one more thing, make sure that you have a Dard Drive with a capacity of a least 80gb, because if you're like me, and you have a large game collection, you'll find yourself filling your HDD really quickly.

Always smart to make a seperate partition with the disc images on it too, then you wont have to spend hours loading the images on agn if your system decides to crash.

-The Bumstedman

[jjoel]

i have 60 gigs but don't really have TOO many games. i'll have plenty of space, i doubt i fill up 1/2 of it.

[Paul Komski]

My own favorite is Virtual Drive (http://www.farstone.com/home/en/index.shtml)