As I have very little patience with digging up CDs, I'm trying to set up Empire's Pro Pinball Big Race USA to run without the CD. You know, it's pinball. You just play for a few minutes every few weeks. It's not something you want to hunt down the CD to do.

Sadly, there's no crack on Gamecopy world and a search turned up nothing. Can anyone give me the basics on how to clone a CD to a hard drive? Is it too complicated to do without setting up a separate hard drive partition? I presume I need to download some sort of software CD burning dealie?

-Tom

Occasionally, something comes across that it's fairly easy to do - if you just copy all the files to the hard drive and adjust the source path in the registry, occasionally that helps. Most CDs nowadays have more complicated copy protection than that, but it might be worth trying. Especially for pinball -- that doesn't sound like something that is likely to have airtight protection. Depends on how old it is, and how hard they worked, etc...

Anyway, if you want to try it, before you even copy the files, run 'regedit' and go to local machine, then software...track down your program, and see if there's something that says "Source Path" or somesuch, and will be referenced as "D:\blahblah" (or maybe just D:). Sorry, don't mean to imply that you're an idiot. Just don't know how much experience you have editing your registry. Anyway, just select the source path, and (I believe it's under edit) select modify and adjust it to match where you plan to install the files.

Anyway, this doesn't work with most now stuff, but it might be worth a shot. Like I said, it just depends on how tight they made the protection on the CD...

I'll have to defer to a professional if that doesn't work....

Well, I'm no 3L33T haxor dude, but I was on a I-Shall-Never-Hunt-Down-Another-CD kick awhile ago, so I'll share my research.

If Murph's stuff doens't work, try this: the idea is that you use a special utility to make an image of the CD on your hard disk, then use another utility to load that image into a "virtual" CD ROM drive.

The virtual CD ROM thing is cool. At one point, I had a dozen CD ROM's appearing in the Windows Device Manager, each of which had a copy protected CD image loaded. Especially nice for Longbow2, where you need to occasionally switch between two CD's. I had an image of each disk in its own CD drive.

The downside is it takes up a lot of hard disk space. Also, some games do funky things they see you have more than on CD ROM. You'll always want your real CD ROM to be the lowest letter (D) and the virtuals to be higher (E, F, etc.). This doesn't always work, but if you absolutely need to you can use the virtual CD ROM utility to remove all the virtuals. This, however, requires a reboot.

There are many of these utilities about, but here's a one stop shopping link that has one of each.

http://www.daemon-tools.com/daemon.htm

I haven't tried it personally but have heard mucho good things about this guy's stuff. If you need a hacked copy of the Virtual CD ROM utility (they're out of business now), I have the hack (a key generator dealy) somewhere around here. Post and I'll hunt it down.

heh. Quite an investment for a little pinball. Almost better to pop a quarter in the machine, but at least you'll be all setup if you wanted to copy some other game to your disk.

Good luck!

Um, this is not directly related, but anyone running Windows 9X that is tired of seeing "please insert the Windows 9X CD into the CD drive" everytime they install some new hardware, you can edit your registry to fix that, too. Copy the Windows 98 CD to the hard drive, and in the registry under 'local machine' and 'software' go to 'Microsoft' then 'Windows' then 'current version' then click the folder called 'setup.' One of the choices there is 'SourcePath,' and you can change that to reflect the location of the Windows files. (All you need to copy is the folder called 'Win98' -- not the entire CD. I'm not as sure about 95...)

"nyone running Windows 9X that is tired of seeing 'please insert the Windows 9X CD into the CD drive'"

Good tip. I hate that message. I do this on all three of the machines at the house. It's only like ~200 MB or something (too lazy to look) and it makes upgrading much more pleasent.

Yeah, we do this on every computer we build, to ease our customers. **PLEASE no one read that and think "They obviously pirate windows" -- we don't. Every customer gets a legit copy of Win-Whatever and a Certificate of Authenticity. We just do that for their convenience. Thought it might be able to help someone here out.

Yep I have been doing that for years. I even do that with Windows NT4 and Windows 2000.

Well, your first stop should be:

www.gamecopyworld.com

Where I think you'll find much satisfaction. If the game is "safedisc" protected, you can get the unsafedisc utility to make a seperate executable that ignores the protection scheme.

Dude Tom, you're obviously not l33t if you use a 7 for an L. 7s are Ts. You can do 1s in place of Ls. 1337 hax0r.

Shouldn't that be "h4x0r"?

Obviously Tom really wants a "Teet haxor." And I'm not sure we really want to question that too closely... ;)

Chick is obviously a 1337 p0zUr with his misuse of the 7. Unless Ben is right that is... =)

--Dave