FarStone GameDrive 10
Nothing is worse than going to a LAN party with your PC in tow, only to realize you left the game CDs you need to start the carnage at home. Gnashing your teeth in frustration, with hundreds of gigabytes of storage at your disposal, there should be some way to store your game discs on your hard drive. Well, there is with GameDrive 10, a CD/DVD emulator.
Simply copying files from a CD or DVD to a folder on your hard drive rarely works for this. Anti-piracy routines built in to most commercial games check to ensure an actual disc is in the optical drive. This means GameDrive must emulate both a disc and a drive, which it does. The program can emulate up to 23 optical drives at once, with each mapping to a standard drive letter, although most users just emulate one or two and swap virtual disc images from within a game. Programmable hot keys work from within pretty much any game, but you’ll need to remember the hotkey (no easy task in the heat of battle) or just ALT-TAB back to the Windows Desktop and swap “discs” via the GUI.
Compatibility with new games and anti-piracy schemes is surprisingly good. This is mostly because GameDrive employs a Symantec-like LiveUpdate feature that automatically downloads current updates and patches. This optional feature is $29 a year. If your existing games work, however, you don’t need to update.
You can compress disc images to save space, but combining high-compression with copy protection can cause image creation times to run past an hour per disc on some systems. Doom 3 discs took me 32 minutes each on a 3GHz Pentium 4 system with an 8X DVD burner. However, Doom 3 started 10 times faster with GameDrive, and switching scenes was lightning fast.
Although freeware alternatives exist, they lack GameDrive’s broad compatibility and convenience features. And $29.99 is a small price for leaving those CDs at home where they belong.