I’m lazy. In fact, I’m so lazy that I’ll spend 10 hours working on something that’ll shave ten minutes off some other task.
My current time-saving crusade is part of an attempt to work through the backlog of games I have. Although I probably really should focus on one at a time, I like to switch back and forth every so often, and that’s a bit of a pain. Thanks to the current copy-protection schemes, you need to put one of the original discs in, and keeping all those CDs nearby and searching through them and changing them is annoying. Although there are ‘no-cd’ cracks out there, I’ve had trouble getting a lot of them to work, they don’t always exist for that specific game and/or patch, they aren’t exactly from a trustworthy source, etc…
Instead, the solution I’m trying now is to use the Daemon Tools package to act as a ‘virtual’ CD drive, and DDump to rip copies of all the CDs. Then switching between CDs is just a menu selection, and I can even store the ripped images on the file server now that I’ve got sharing set up properly. Normally programs like these are considered pirating tools, but hey, there are legitimate uses after all…
Of course now I have to rip all of those games to disk, which is taking even longer than expected. It looks like some of the more common copy-protection schemes really slow down certain stages of the copying — it’ll take 20 minutes to read the first 10,000 or so sectors, then 8 minutes to whip through the next 300,000… At least I only have to do it for the play discs.