Mostly asking because I’ve never used these before due to never needing to. That, and I have a few old disc based PC games that I’d love to be able to straight up boot without the game disc. These are games I could just pirate, but I figure I already own them in disc, so I’d rather see if there are any reputable places with no-disc patches. The places I’ve looked in the megathread don’t have what I’m looking for.
Closest they have is either a link to the game on another platform in the case of My Abandonware due to it being sold, or a link to just straight up pirate the full thing in the case of Magipack Games. I’ve also done some digging on the Internet Archive but have yet to yield results (probably because I suck at finding things there). Still gonna keep looking there, but any helpful info would be much appreciated.
I don’t think I can share the game names, even in DM, due to the rules here, so site mainpages are my best shot.
Those no-disc patches can be sketchy and infected, so watch out!
My preferred way to play games without CDs was virtual disc emulators, so you can store a copy of your game disc on your hard drive, and virtually pop that game’s CD image into the virtual drive in when you want to play that specific game.
One good trick with these, is that you don’t even need a full copy of the disc: There was some trick to creating a very small disc image that just has enough information to get past the game’s copy protection, but it’s been well over 2 decades since I did any of that, so you’ll have to do your own research.
As someone pointed out, gamecopyworld used to have mini iso files for that purpose. They had a guide on how to make your own mini iso as well.
There used to be a site I looked at a few years back that I don’t recall the name of, but it definitely felt a little sketchy. Same with the one file I downloaded. Set off Windows Defender real quick and that told me to stay away from that site.
Definitely gonna have to look in virtual disc emulating them. I have a virtual disc drive program on my desktop, so I could look into trying to make that work. That, or I’ll try and find the small disc image thing you brought up to save space while trying to make that vde thing work.
Thanks for the info.
The full disc images worked well, and hard drive space is so cheap these days, that I’d worry about getting the virtual drive emulator working first.
WinCDEmu is FOSS, so you might look into that first.
Back in the day, I bought Alcohol 120, and it worked great.
The mini-CD image trick (optional): https://forum.daemon-tools.cc/forum/copy-methods-questions-daemon-tools/general-copy-discussion/4900-
You can use something like InfraRecorder to save your existing CD into an ISO file, and then use Virtual CloneDrive to emulate having a CD-ROM drive and mount the ISO.
I used an older form of this method in the past as I was tired of finding no cd patches whenever I had game updates break the functionality. Depending on the game’s DRM, it may not allow using an emulated drive, so ymmv. I have personally not had issues with the method myself. Since then I have digitally bought titles from Steam.
Hope this helps!
