Virtual CD/DVD drives

I always wondered why would anyone use a virtual drive app like Alcohol or Daemon Tools or whatever if they owned the CD? It seemed as if these programs were kind of "shady" in terms of their legal usefulness. That was until a couple of days ago. Occasionally I let my room-mates play games on my PC, one of my rules was I HAD to be home. Well, in the middle of a heated Serious Sam2 session I had to leave. I came home and everything seemed OK and I kind of forgot about the game. I was just informed (about 3 minutes ago) that the game DVD was haphazardly removed (why it wasn't left in the PC has been left unanswered) and is now basically useless. The roomies will buy a new one from somewhere, they're fairly resourceful when it comes to replacing my stuff that they break, lose, loan and never get back, etc. They always pull through and replace it, they're good that way, they just shouldn't have to replace my stuff if they were more careful with it. That's not the point. I now see the benefits of a virtual drive: the roomies never need to even see that discs in order to play the games. I have MagicISO and it has a free companion called MagicDisk, there's Alcohol 52% and Alcohol 120% (what's the difference?), there's Daemon Tools (rumored to have spyware), and so on. Now that this thread has become ridiculously long and boring, and everyone has lost interest, what's a good (preferably free) virtual drive app? And how would I put Serious Sam 2 (for example) into the virtual drive?
Much thanks :major

 

Operating on the theory that free is good, alcohol 52 has a free version for home users.
http://www.free-downloads.net/programs/Alcohol_52__Free_Edition
The difference between it and the paid version is that you can only have 6 virtual drives but the paid allows 31. How many games don't you want your roommates to touch?
Alcohol 120 also burns CD and DVDs that have copy protection, I think so you can burn a copy of the game and give that to your roommates to play. Your original stays safely out of their hands.

 

Right, virtual CDs are very useful. Daemon tools has gone "Pro' and it is very good at emulation. The old freeware version came with a bit of "spyware" on the installer, but they were upfront about it & you could remove it after the install - easy enough.
Along time ago on Tech TV Leo did a story about "no cd" fixes for games. He considered it legal to bypass the needed CD. I won't post any links but you can always google it.

So my recommendations:
Free Daemon Tools (go to old version hosting site)
Free Slysoft Virtual CD
or
No-CD fixes.

 

So I'd need to set up a virtual drive for each game.... luckily there's only 2 or 3 that they really like to play. So, once a virtual drive is set up, and a game is put in it, is it there 'forever'? Does it survive shutting down and rebooting? How do I get rid of it when I don't need/want it anymore (I guess just uninstalling Alcohol or whatever)?
Thanks. So far, the info has been very helpful.

( I feel like a noob LOL)

Oh yeah.... like I said in my first lengthy post: I'm running MagicISO and they have a free virtual CD "add-on" called Magic Disk. It supports all types of image files and I'm wondering if I should just go ahead and use it since I already have MagicISO, or if I should use something else that's more well known for support reasons, or if it really doesn't matter..... actually, it's hard to tell if MagicDisk is an add-on and requires MagicISO, or if it's a seperate independent app from the same company. Here's info http://www.magiciso.com/tutorials/miso-magicdisc-overview.htm
Thanks again.

 

Can't help on the virtual drive front, dlb, because I've never used any product to set one up.
If you know Magic ISO and it does allow virtual drives, I'd be inclined to work with it. The less programs to learn the better I'll figure out the ones I have.

 

Well, I installed MagicDisk on a PC that did not have MagicISO on it, mainly to see if they worked together, and MagicDisk runs just fine on its own. I haven't really used any virtual CD utilities before, but this is really easy to use, plus they have an online guide and help. If anyone is looking for a FREE virtual drive program, take a look at MagicDisk. I haven't spent alot time with it, so I don't know how many drives you can set up (I only needed one at the time) but it's easy to use and free. Here's some links:
MagicDisk: program description & download link http://www.magiciso.com/tutorials/miso-magicdisc-overview.htm
How-to mount a MagicDisk drive http://www.magiciso.com/tutorials/miso-magicdisc-mount.htm
How-to unmount http://www.magiciso.com/tutorials/miso-magicdisc-unmount.htm
Like I said, I haven't used this extensively, so if you have problems, questions, whatever, I'm not the guy to ask Go straight to the MagicDisk folks at one of the links above.
:major

 

This will also be of use.

http://www.120search.net/

Good Luck