Keeping Children's Software on a Networked Server?

mache asks: "I have a seven year old son with his own Windows 98 machine and he has many, many educational and game CDs that his stupid parents have purchased for him. These CDs often get lost and scratched. Many of these applications will not operate without the CD being in the CD drive. At an average of $20 or more, I want to be able to load a CD on to a Linux server once and then access the application through Samba. I understand that there are some applications out there that provide a 'virutal' CD player interface to a remote server and may defeat the copy protection mechanisms (deliberately placed bad tracks) in place on kid/game/educational CDs. I bought the CDs legitimately and just want to use them legitimately rather than having my son destroy them, forcing me to buy him new ones. Does anyone have a recommendation for a Windows-based application that would produce a 'virutal' CD player on a Windows 98 machine and also defeat currently used CD copy protection allowing some sort of CD image to reside on my in-home networked server."

Comments

try

[cassidyc]

www.daemon-tools.net has tools for copying CDs and copes with safedisk protection

CJC

There was an article in LJ

[redcliffe]

Last month on this. I'm using it now, works great. Uses Samba and autofs to mount iso images on the fly. The only problem is that some installers won't work because it's not coming off a cd drive. Anyone know how to fix that? Thanks,

Not true anymore.

[Chasing Amy]

That was true four or five years ago, but not today. There are many copy-protection mechanisms in place on contemporary CD-ROM games which really do require the CD to be inserted, such as SafeDisc, SafeDisc 2, LaserLok, and Securom.

Fortunately, Daemon Tools defeats most forms of such CD-check copy protection, and new fixes are being incorporated all the time.

http://www.daemon-tools.net/main.htm is the place to get Daemon Tools. It's a virtual CD-ROM drive which not only mounts CD images, it will also emulate the proper security mechanism that the origional CD would have.

Anyone who wants to copy a copy-protected CD, or host CD images for a virtual CD-ROM drive, should read the tutorials on that site I referenced.

Re:Not true anymore.

[dougmc]

... effectively doubling the amount of hard drive space needed per game;

So what? With 120GB drives on sale at Fry's for $109 (the link is good as of 06/14/02, not sure how long it'll stay good), you can afford to do full installs AND include a disk image. Even if your game has 4 CD's at 700 MB each and takes 3 GB installed, that's only 1/20th of your disk -- about $6 worth for your $40

Yes, it's obscene how large games are getting, and how much space they take. But then again, it's also obscene how large disks are getting and how cheap they are :)

(And yes, these are 5400 RPM drives. So what? They can still do 20 MB/s quite easily. And yes, they're IDE, but for a computer for playing games, that's just fine.)

Daemon Tools

[DiSKiLLeR]

There is a program called Daemon Tools.

It runs on Win95/98/ME, and NT4/W2K/XP.

It'll mount .iso images, cdrwin, clonecd, and other cd and dvd images. It also emulates various cd copy protection schemes.

Programs/apps/games think its a real CD in a real CD-Rom drive, because it installs a 'virtual SCSI card', and 'virtual SCSI CDrom/DVDrom'. Its as real as it can get. But the driver doesn't talk to actual physical hardware, it just talks to a file on your local or remote filesystem.

So. Use CloneCD (or whatever, but clonecd is definitely best) and image all your kids' CDs onto the linux server. And use daemon tools to mount the cd images over samba.

I hardly use any CDs anymore. I have literally 100s of CloneCD image's on my fileserver, and just mount them using Daemon-Tools over Samba.

You will LOVE this program!

D.

Re:what about Macs

[jmenezes]

On a Mac, you can actually just load up a disk image onto the desktop and it will run.
I've run several games this way, much faster then being on the cd drive.
Apple's own disk image will do the trick.
In OS X, im not sure if thats still the way to do it, but its always worked for me and my little brothers games under MacOS 7+

VMware can spoof a CD drive

[Thing 1]

I have used CloneCD or Undisker to create an .ISO image, and then mounted that as a CD drive in a virtual machine under VMware .

Yes, it's a bit more work, and the daemon-tools that everyone's mentioning look nice, but TMTOWTDI, and for me one of the other ways is with VMware.

The other benefit being, if you set it up right, the critter will have his own "sandbox" and can blown up the VM but it's really easy to back up the VM's directory, so when s/he does take the machine down, you can bring it back in a couple minutes of copying, rather than a couple hours of reinstalling.

The drawback? Fast games won't be.

I use CDspace

[Polo]

I've used CDSpace for quite a while and really really like it.

Look at http://www.cdspace.com to find it.

It's not free, but it's inexpensive. It has worked on EVERY game I've ever bought. You just scan an image into a disk file and then you can just mount the file.

If you're setting up your kid's machine, I'd probably mount the files locally. Also, for minimum hassle, I would create a whole bunch
of drives, one for each application so you don't have to switch files.

Second'ing CloneCD...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used CloneCD too. Never had any problems. It very nicely duplicates all the copy-protection bits as well as the actual data... Works wonders for making backup copies of games and such.

In constrast to my cdrom drives, which corrupt the data as it's read off the "copy-protected" discs about 50% of the time, rendering the software unusable. (Had to create a non-copy-protected "correct" disk to install the software, and a second "copy-protection-enabled" disk to actually use the software. Does anyone else besides me think it's nuts that these "copy-protection" systems require me to make TWO copies before I can even run the software?)