Playing childrens games from the Hard Drive

[paulcph]

Hi; I have a couple of small kids, & I bought a bunch of Disney Toddler, Jump Start, etc, only to find to my incredible annoyance that the CD's have to be actually in the drive to play. That's enough of a pain for adults, but you can guess that's a recepe for disaster with 3 year olds.

I've heard of some CD emulator tools, like Blind Write; but there's also the free Deamon Tools. Is that enough? What do I need to play these CD's from the hard drive?

Thanks,

Paul

[NARS]

With Daemon Tools you can have up to 4 virtual drives where you can mount CD/DVD images, but to create the images from your CD/DVD disc's you will have to use another program (usually burning programs allow this) because Daemon Tools doesn't create them.
If you need more than 4 virtual drives or if you want a solution that allows also to create your images from your disc's you can look at some other solutions like Alcohol 52%.

[wmbrae]

I am a newbie.
I was successful in copying 3 children cd's using Nero 6 and then mounting the iso images on Daemon drives, installing the programs and then running the programs.
I was unsuccessful with Disney Magic Artist Delux.
I created the iso image using Nero and was able to install the program from the iso image using a Daemon drive.
Everytime I try to launch the program it gives a popup box with the message CS:Wrong disc inserted.
So the question is what is the difference between the real CD and the iso image to have the program conclude it was not looking at the real CD or does the program have some sort of hardware test to know a real Cd?
Any suggestions?
Thanks

[Underheaven]

Don't Use Nero

wmbrae, Nero is generally not used for making images of copy protected discs.

Scan the disc with ProtectionID if you want to determine the copy protection used. Then use DAEMON Tools Pro or Alcohol or BlindRead to make a new image of the disc.

[wmbrae]

I scanned with ProtectionID. It detected traces of Secure Rom. For Daemon Tools Lite I set emulation -all options ON.
I tried Alcohol120 1..9.7.6221.
When trying to mount the image (mds), a pop up box shows
Daemon Tools
Unable to mount image
File not accessable.
Because Alcohol120 has a limited trial period, I used the Alcohol120 virtual drive and was successful in running Disney Magic Artist.
I had misadventures with Blindwrite.
I downloaded, installed and ran Blindwrite6.
I went to mount Daemon Tools Lite and found out I had to do it all over again using Blindwrite5.
I was able to install running the Blindwrite5 image. Then I ran the installed program,
good news didn't get message to supply cd
bad news program just stalled with a blank screen.
The Alcohol120 image is promising, can you explain the error message?
Thanks for your patience.

[wmbrae]

Update on Blindwrite.
I deleted the first image, re-ran Blindwrite using the automatic option, installed the program from image and ran Disney Magic Artist.
So Daemon-tools works fine.
Newbie teething problems.
Thanks for your help.

[Jito463]

@wmbrae
Do not enable emulation options unless you're playing from a physical backup copy. It can actually cause images not to work.

[Underheaven]

Happy

Glad to hear you got everything working! Sometimes it takes a few tries (especially if you don't know what read settings to use) but the result is always worth it.