Any Virtual CD solutions, i.e. no original disk required...?

[chelsel]

On my Windows machine I was able to use a program called VirtualDrive http://www.farstone.com/software/virtualdrive.htm to create a master catalog of all my game and application CDs... this way I did not have to insert them each time they were required for a game... and if I lost a CD or the CD was damaged I wasn't out of luck. This also made reinstalling/rebuilding machines faster as I could just mount CD images as a file on the hard disk and get lightning quick read times...

The best I've been able to do on the Mac is create a .cdr using Disk Utility and mount it... however applications don't treat the mounted image as a CD-ROM... is this something that you can do on the Mac, even by purchasing software?

Thanks!

P.S. This is not to get around copyright protection or for illegal sharing... this is just to make my life easier with managing dozens and dozens of CDs... plus it's something you can do in Windows so you have to be able to do it on the Mac, right??

 

[72930]

I think Toast is what you're looking for

 

[chelsel]

I can't find anything that mentions the functionality I'm referring to... any idea if there is a trial? In the Windows world Nero and Roxio are terrible and to be avoided at all costs... but it may be different on the Mac as there are far fewer configurations they have to support...

 

[aidanpendragon]

The best I've been able to do on the Mac is create a .cdr using Disk Utility and mount it... however applications don't treat the mounted image as a CD-ROM... is this something that you can do on the Mac, even by purchasing software?

This sounds like the right track to me. Some/many apps should treat the mounted image like the original. With some games, though, they require the original. Disk Image or Toast, the procedure is the same.

 

[marioman38]

Toast works great for this.

Open toast
select Utilities menu
Click "Mount Disk Image"
Select most any image format (.dmg .iso .toast all work, some others too)
Click "Mount"

Mac acts as if you've got the disk right in your drive.

(I use Disk Utility to create the image as a .dmg not .cdr)

 

[Xeem]

I've found that it's kind of hit and miss depending on the application. Warcraft 3, for example, can boot from .dmg files created via Disk Utility, but few other games I own do. Toast works with many other applications as well (especially emulators).