DAEMON TOOLS – Playing Your Favorite PC Games Without A Disc

Oftentimes after countless hours spent playing your favorite PC game, one will find that the game disc slowly wastes away from the rigors of use or a clumsy sibling. Thankfully there’s a nifty program called Daemon Tools that allows you to do more than other programs and just make a backup copy, and instead allows you to mount the disc image so that you NEVER have to use that beat up game disc again.

My favorite online game is Battlefield 1942. Sure call me “old school,” but this game is the gift that keeps on giving, I never tire of it (Midway map anyone?). Unfortunately, as you can see below, it looks like the disc has literally been strafed by one of those dam Japanese Zeros in the game.

Well, luckily Daemon Tools is the perfect solution to my problem.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
What is Daemon Tools?
What Type of Disc Images Does it Support?
Making a Disc Image
Mounting a Disc Image to Play

What is Daemon Tools?
Daemon Tools is basically an emulator that becomes a virtual CD or DVD drive from which you can run either type of game without the need for the disc. So the first thing we need to do is create an image of the game disc so that we can then mount it in Damon Tools and play. The types of image files that it supports are as follows:

• cue/bin
• iso
• ccd (CloneCD)
• bwt (Blindwrite)
• mds (Media Descriptor File)
• cdi (Discjuggler)
• nrg (Nero)
• pdi (Instant CD/DVD)
• b5t (BlindWrite 5)

Each of these images is fairly easy to make, the choice of which to program to use to make them is up to you. Being that Alcohol 120% is probably the most commonly used as well as user friendly, it’s the one that I have selected to demonstrate the image creation process with.

If you don’t already have Alcohol 120%, download and install it now.

Making a Disc Image

Next, select and open the Image Making Wizard from the man menu dialogue box as shown below.

This will bring up the Image Making Wizard. Here we need to do several things. First, select the correct drive device in the selection box at the top of the menu. In my case, the Battlefield 1942 game disc that I ‘m trying to back up is a CD placed in my (F:) drive.

For the Read Speed I recommend one somewhere halfway between the maximum and the minimum that the drive is capable of. Mine has a 52X maximum and 12X minimum, so I selected a 32X speed. The reason for this is that just like burning a disc you want the drive to take its time and do the job properly. By maxing out the read speed you risk rushing the job and creating a poorer quality image than you would otherwise. Others may disagree but I swear by it.

After making your selection, be sure to also choose the type of disc your copying in the box at the bottom of the Wizard menu. Here I selected General Protected CD as it best matches my disc type.. Finish up the selections in the Wizard menu by clicking Next.

In the dialogue box that follows, as is shown below, we need to do several things. First of all, select an Image Location and Image Name for where and how you want the image to be saved to on your hard drive. I chose to leave the name as is it is on the game disc itself as shown in the picture, and then selected my (D:) drive as the save path.

To finish here, choose an image format to save the game disc as. I chose .mds but Daemon Tools does support all of the following image types as previously stated:

• cue/bin
• iso
• ccd (CloneCD)
• bwt (Blindwrite)
• mds (Media Descriptor File)
• cdi (Discjuggler)
• nrg (Nero)
• pdi (Instant CD/DVD)
• b5t (BlindWrite 5)

After choosing an image type select Start to begin burning the image.

Alcohol 120% will then start burning the image as requested.

When Alcohol 120% has completed burning the disc image, the Image Making Wizard will close and bring you back to the main menu. Simply close Alcohol 120% to proceed.

Mounting a Disc Image to Play

The next step is to open up Daemon Tools to mount the image we just created. Now when you open up Daemon Tools it will be in the form of an icon located in the icon tray at the bottom right-hand part of your screen. Right-click the icon and scroll up to Virtual CD/DVD-ROM.

From there scroll left to Device 0: [G:] No Media >, then scroll right to Mount image.

This will bring up the selection box where you locate and open the image file you created in Alcohol 120% previously.

If all goes well the game image you created and then of course mounted should open for you to play. As shown below, the Battlefield 1942 image that I created and mounted open successfully. Midway here I come.

It may take some time and some tinkering around for you to get it just right, but if you follow the instructions I’ve detailed above you should have no problem getting the backup disc up and running.

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