I have probably 50 cd's with games on them from like late 90s- maybe 2001. I don't play many of them much, but would like to get rid of the disks in favor of putting on an external drive or something. Most of them I'm guessing some sort of IP protection thing will error out unless you have the disk in. I tried making an iso image, and mounting, extracting to cache and running, it still errors out. If I can get these onto an external or something else the disks are going to be destroyed and thrown out. I am not going to do anything other than run them from some other media, and maybe make a backup of that drive along with documents, etc.

I just don't like disk format due to space they take, some of them are starting to show signs of wear, an not sure how long they will last.

 

I tried making an iso image, and mounting, extracting to cache and running, it still errors out.

Have you tried using the image to burn a rewriteable disk and run from that?

 

Try a disc emulator like Daemon Tools Lite or see if you can find a No-CD crack for your particular games. Some useful information here.

 

Alec T the goal id to eliminate as many disks as I can like 6CD take up room of a drive I could store my entire library on.

I had tried daemon tools to mound an iso on a test virtual machine, it failed, I tried same thing on xp laptop worked fine. Think ISO may work fine after all.

 

Alec T the goal id to eliminate as many disks as I can

I realise that. My suggestion was just so that the ISO image could be tested for IP protection, regardless of the medium it was on.

 

ok I see what you mean. Didn't think about it like that. =)

 

I use to break the protection on the old floppy disk and CD games just for the fun of it. I couldn’t tell specifically what program to use because I haven’t done it in a long time.

The gist of it was sector errors were purposely created during formatting (i.e. CRC, sector number, sector size, etc.) and these were verified to exist before the game would run. If you copied these, the errors would be corrected or otherwise removed. Some errors were created by using a laser after producing the disk.

Some disks would just call a subroutine to verify the errors and you could just replace the call with a simple return. Because these disks were formatted directly with the final image, they could include any non-standard format. This means that the boot sector could contain a program that loaded any made-up format.

Copy programs were written that could read and write CD’s digitally which basically creates an exact copy bit by bit. I know that some of these programs could even reproduce the laser burnt error. Later these programs could create ISO files that you could load as a virtual CD, which would load almost instantly.

Those programs may still be around but may only be found on unscrupulous sites.