One of the the disadvantages of ultra-mobile PCs is the complete lack of a CD or DVD drive. Adding a USB optical drive is the easiest way to compensate for this, but it takes a lot of the "ultra-mobile" away from a UMPC. You can also expect external drives to be either big and clunky (requiring their own power) or very expensive.
Fear not! There is a solution to this! I am going to introduce you to a few CD emulator packages with which I decided to experiment. I didn't mention it before, but this is how I got The Sims 2 and Diablo 2 to run in my UMPC gaming/entertainment demo.
Alcohol 52%
- Creating disc images
- Drive emulation
- $27 USD (€22.30 EUR) at the time of this writing.
- Freeware Edition Available (license limitations and includes some search toolbar)
- All the features of Alcohol 52%
- CD and DVD burning capabilities
- Load up to 31 virtual drives
- $55 USD (€42.51 EUR)
- CD/DVD emulation
- Load up to 4 virtual drives
- Emulation of protected CD formats
- Free download!
Alcohol 52% introduction:
I retrieved Alcohol 52% from the Trial Page and installed it. The download was only 6.5 megs. I was greeted by a friendly nag screen that reminded me I had an unregistered copy and waited a few seconds before it allowed me into the program. Once the program loaded, I heard the familiar beep that happens when I connect a USB device. The program informed me that it was applying virtual device settings and then prompted me with the standard application screen.
Creating a Disc Image:
This couldn't be any easier. Right on the main screen is an "image making wizard." I simply put a disc in the drive, clicked "next," chose a place to save it, and clicked "start." The disc I chose was the Diablo II expansion CD, which is 549M large and took under 5 minutes to create. Whe it was done, I saw the image listed in the Alcohol software window. I right-clicked it and mounted it as a device and it worked as though the disc were in the drive.
Using Daemon Tools:
Alcohol 52% created two files:
EXPANSION.mdf (645,925 KB)
EXPANSION.mds (1 kb)
I copied both to my UMPC over the network (the slowest part of this procedure so far) and installed Daemon Tools. This required a reboot, but once it was up I got this icon in the bottom left:
Upon right-clicking the icon, I chose the device (my virtual E: drive) and then navigated to the MDS file that Alcohol created. The results:
Double click on it:
The only disadvantages to this are that you have to keep a copy of all the discs you want to use on the UMPCs hard drive. This can get very large, as DVDs are generally around 2 gigs. Due to copyright laws, DVDs that are CCS encrypted cannot be emulated in this way, so don't expect to rip your Lord of the Rings collection with Alcohol. Finally, if you want another CD howto I once wrote, well... it's a little different.
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