While some people consider ripping CD's to ISO format to be piracy, I personally do not. The reason is that there are a number of legal advantages to running your games via ISOs instead of keeping the physical CDs:
- ISOs can serve as a means of backing up your games - cd's can get scratched / lost
- ISOs are stored on your computer. They are always with you.
- Mounted ISO files run much faster than CDROM drives, = better game performance
- You can mount many virtual drives. Usually as many as you have drive letters for. Which means you don't have the "please insert disk 2", "please insert disk 3", "please insert disk 263" etc. problem.
Of course, distributing that ISO to other people would be piracy. So you shouldn't do that.
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by: Frosty555Posted on 2008-09-14 at 18:56:24ID: 22475535
If you have a legal copy of the game, you may rip an "image" of the CD to your hard drive in ISO format. And then, you can use various programs to "mount" that ISO as a virtual cdrom drive. In theory the game can't tell the difference between a mounted virtual drive, and a real cdrom drive with a cd in it. In reality, it's hit or miss, some games detect it and fail anyways, some don't.
wnload.htm m/ /dtcc/down load.php?c atid=5& mod e=ViewCate gory
Tools that are capable of ripping your CD to iso, and then subsequently mounting it include:
PowerISO - http://www.poweriso.com/do
Alcohol 120% - http://www.alcohol-soft.co
Daemon Tools - http://www.daemon-tools.cc
And there are of course the totally illegal ways of doing it - e.g. attempting to bypass the protection of the game by varous devious means. That we are not allowed to talk about ;)