Modern Arcade Machine... Need Ideas

[highland04]

There are a few games I want to run on my arcade cab that require a cd.

I'm using gameex and running mame, nes, snes, genesis, n64, etc...  i've got a few dos games, and i want a few PC games (driver, crazy taxi, driv3r).

Some require CD's and others dont.

Does anyone have ideas as to how I can open the games without needing a CD through a graphical frontend? (i use gameex)

I tried Game Jackal... it didnt work...  There are not no-cd cracks available for all the games I have yet and I dont have the know-how to write them...  any ideas?  Better yet, anything free?

thanks,
highland04

[jrsquared]

You can rip your Cd's to ISO's using most commercial CD-Burning software (i.e. Nero) or with a program like UltraISO.   You can then use Daemon-Tools to mount these images (www.daemon-tools.cc).  Daemon-Tools will take an ISO file (an image of the CD) and create a "virtual" CD drive to "insert" the CD into, thus fooling the game that there is a CD in the drive. 

Daemon-Tools has a command line interface for mounting specific images which, I believe, you can put the commands into the GameEx configuration ini to mount the specific image for the selected game.


For Example:  "C:\Program Files\D-Tools\daemon.exe" -mount 0,"%1"

"C:\Program Files\D-Tools\daemon.exe" - being the executable for Daemon-Tools
-mount - the operator to mount a drive
0 - the number of the drive to mount to (Daemon-Tools allows the creation of multiple virtual drives)
%1 - the name of the image that you wish to mount

I know there are tools other than Daemon-Tools for image mounting but I have found this to be the easiest and it is the only one I know how to use from the command-line which would be theonly way to make GameEx mount the images that you need at run-time.

I hope that all made sense!  I haven't actually tried this method myself but it should work in theory.

(and yes, Daemon-Tools is free) 
This is actually a preferred way to No-CD cracks because it does not modify the main executable which can lead to memory leaks, trojans and other like things that you do not want.

Legal Disclaimer: You can only make images of Cd's that you actually own for archiving purposes!

[highland04]

that's a good idea, but it takes up a TON of space.

any other ideas?  thanks

[headkaze]

Look at these places for no-cd cracks, if you can't find one use the method above.

http://www.gameburnworld.com/gameburnworld.htm
http://www.gamecopyworld.com/