Pc game help

[MattRooney06]

What's up Escapist =^.^=

Having a wee problem at the moment, to cut a long story short this is it:

So recently I installed Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 on my Laptop, now i've been having a few problems with the disk and I can't get it to work, a friend mentioned to me a while ago that you can download a program to play PC games without there disks, is this a thing? if so how would one go about setting it up?

(Disclaimer: I'm not looking to pirate the game or anything like that, I already have the disk, I just can't get it to work, and I don't really want to have to buy a new disk)

Thanks ^^

 

[Joccaren]

He's probably talking about a crack. It'll be individual to each game, and is equivalent to hacking the game. Generally the main way to get these is by, you guessed it, pirating the game.
Otherwise there's .ISO mounters which can take a burned 'image' of the CD and make the PC believe its got a physical CD in it rather than a digital clone. This is arguably the more legal way to do it - download a .iso and a .iso reader, mount the .iso but don't install the crack. Sadly I believe this is only fully legal if you make the .iso yourself.
So, your best bet ATM is getting a .iso reader/burner, putting the CD in and trying to make the CD work. When it does work burn the CD to an iso, and mount that ISO from now on rather than the CD, as the digital copy shouldn't get damaged. + It should be completely legal.

Can't think of any other non-illegal measures that allow you to play PC games without the CD though. Older games used to let you opt to use the CD or install completely to Harddrive and not need it, but newer games use the CD as a form of DRM to ensure you actually have the disc, even though its easily spoofed.

 

[teqrevisited]

I'd definitely suggest trying the disc image method. I've had problems with games and dvds that just wont play nicely with my dvd drive, so I copied the files as they were, made an .iso and mounted them to a virtual drive and they worked fine. It might not necessarily work with every disc due to their individual copy protection though. For what it's worth, I use Nero to burn the .iso files and Virtual Clone Drive to mount them.

So long as you don't distribute the files you'll be fine.

 

[Ickorus]

I'd definitely suggest trying the disc image method. I've had problems with games and dvds that just wont play nicely with my dvd drive, so I copied the files as they were, made an .iso and mounted them to a virtual drive and they worked fine. It might not necessarily work with every disc due to their individual copy protection though. For what it's worth, I use Nero to burn the .iso files and Virtual Clone Drive to mount them.

So long as you don't distribute the files you'll be fine.

This man speaks truths but just to give you a hand, here are the links you'll need:

Virtual Clone Drive [http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html]
Nero [http://download.cnet.com/Nero-9-Free-Version/3000-2646_4-11098920.html]