Help with creating small mountable images please.

Hi,

can anyone either direct me to a good thread or answer this query directly. I am looking for a way to create an image mountable in either Daemon tools or Alcohol120 but it needs to be smallish.

I have two kids, both with their own pc's and an annoying habit of nicking my games and leaving my disks lying around to get damaged. I have been, till recently, creating backups for them to use or downloading NOCD patches which is even better as they don't even have to bother with the cd's then.

The recent crop of games are getting harder to obtain nocd patches for so I have gone back to creating backup cd's. I have recently discovered virtual drives and mountable images.

I bought my son Star Wars Battlefront II for Xmas which comes in DVD format. Not having a DVD burner I found a mountable MDF/MDS image to allow the game to start without requiring the DVD though you do have to hide the virtual drive with SR7.Stop or Antiblah. The size of these files is less than 1.5MB!

I have been experimenting today with creating images using blindwrite 5. I have created a working mountable image for Dawn of War - Winter Assault, and I mount it using Daemon tools 4 but the file is big as it is the full content of the original disk. I can of course burn it to disk but I'd rather just have a folder on my kids pc's containing relatively small mountable images for them to select from.

So, my big question is: How do I extract/convert/tweak or otherwise manipulate the image I have created to contain just those files required to start the game. All the games installed on my kids machines are full installations, so the cd is purely for security checks in each case.

I have read some threads on this site and it would seem there is no one-stop fix for creating such images. The security for Winter Assault is Securom 7 I believe and as I have already created an image for it I may as well use it as my testbed for my experiments.

Any and all help greatfully welcomed, even if its just a push in the right direction.

Thanks

Can any of you guys help with this?

Impossible. Every game may have a different file access schematic and copy protection. There is not one standard for all things. It would require endless research on every game and even then success is not guarantueed if there is a new update or patch for the game.

I don't think you read the post thoroughly, I never said there was one standard...I know this. What I am asking is, is it possible to shrink a mountable image or indeed create such an image that does not hold the entire contents of the cd.

Actually, I know this is already possible from the mountable images I have downloaded from various places. I just want to know how to do it myself. If it involves coding then it's not an option, but if it's something that can be accomplished using Alcohol120 or blindwrite or any other available software package then it's worth a bit of blood sweat and tears!

Righto, let me rephrase my answer.

By researching what files are necessary for the game to actually be played correctly. You could try recoding video files to make them smaller, but if the game's core checks the files it will fail to start or give weird errors.

Are these various places offering uncopyrighted game images?

Ah, ok got you...looks like I'll just have to carry on making backups for my kids to use.

Not as far as I am aware...the files I am downloading are typically 1 or 2MB in size and just fool the relevent game into thinking the cd is in the drive. I don't subscribe to the philosophy of stealing software; it's a pity more softwarehouses dont follow Sierra's lead with their Steam download engine...no need for cd's at all, just a valid account. Pay and download your software...no problem!