CD Image Format - Blindwrite

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tk421
Posts: 156
Joined: Sat 18 Jun, 2016 6:57 am

CD Image Format - Blindwrite

Post by tk421 »

Good day,

May I ask if PCem can support blindwrite CD image files?

I have one game, NHL 2000, and no matter what it will not load in PCem. I tried ISO, bin/cue and now I am left with a blindwrite version to try. Modern PCs do not seem to come with internal DVD drives so my CD is useless at the moment. Does PCem support external DVD drives?

This game used to run flawlessly on Windows 98. With XP I got it working on two PCs, but these days I am left with a Windows 10 pc. It would be nice to run this game on PCem.

Thank you for your time,

tk421
Cheez
Posts: 86
Joined: Tue 19 Dec, 2017 4:08 am

Re: CD Image Format - Blindwrite

Post by Cheez »

Are you sure the images are at fault? At what point does it fail?

Also, I imagine PCem can support any disc drive that's recognized as such, because it seems to be able to use any host drive whether it be physical or virtual. If you have such a thing it may be worth a try. Or just get a virtual drive program of some sort to use your image with.
Zup
Posts: 83
Joined: Mon 30 Nov, 2015 10:47 am

Re: CD Image Format - Blindwrite

Post by Zup »

What about using a virtual drive like Alcohol 52% or Daemon Tools?

Mount your CD image on the virtual drive and then use it from PCem.
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omarsis81
Posts: 945
Joined: Thu 17 Dec, 2015 6:20 pm

Re: CD Image Format - Blindwrite

Post by omarsis81 »

Maybe is not working because it has some kind of protection
Almost all games from 1999 onward come with a copy protection
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leilei
Posts: 1039
Joined: Fri 25 Apr, 2014 4:47 pm

Re: CD Image Format - Blindwrite

Post by leilei »

I don't think supporting many specific proprietary formats are the way to go though. I'm on the CloneCD side of things where the same image could also double as a bin/cue and i've .ccd'd most of my copyprotected games (and sometimes, works in PCem if I use VirtualCloneDrive with them - but not always. The breaking point are ~2000 Safedisc stuff)
tk421
Posts: 156
Joined: Sat 18 Jun, 2016 6:57 am

Re: CD Image Format - Blindwrite

Post by tk421 »

Thank you for your assistance. With your help, I have successfully run NHL 2000 in PCem. The game looks great, just as I remember it. I always believed it was a clear leap above its predecessors, and an easy game to play compared to its successors. I liked the simple nature of the game as it did not demand much time on my part to play the game. It was a very casual game.

For whatever reason, running the game through PCem alone was impossible. Installing the game was not a problem, but the game would prompt for the CD whenever I tried to run the software.

I greatly appreciate the advice that I use Daemon tools or Alcohol 52% to run the game. PCem recognized both programs immediately as physical drives on the PC, which is a modern MSI laptop (i7 8750H CPU) with no physical optical drive. I am curious to see if this laptop is good enough to run PCem on full specs, so I will do further testing of PCem on this machine. It is notable that Star Trek Armada appears to run at 300 Mhz MMX without problems.

Both Daemon Tools and Alcohol 52% recognized my Blindwrite version of the game without difficulty. Ideally I would want to run a bin/cue version of my CD through PCem proper, so I will attempt to use Alcohol 52% to create a safedisc compliant CD image of my CD. Apparently, according to Alcohol 52%, the NHL 2000 CD uses Safedisc v1 DRM.

My observations so far suggest that NHL 2000 is best run with the ATI Mach 64 2D graphics card coupled with the Voodoo 2 3D graphics card using the drivers that come with the game CD, otherwise graphical errors would pop up impeding proper function of the game.

In this instance, I ran PCem through a VMWare WinXP virtual machine. I will test to see if I can get better performance in PCem on the main computer itself.

Thank you for your help in getting NHL 2000 to run with PCem. PCem is amazing. I question whether this laptop is really the one to use with PCem, and VMWare, but with further testing I will have a better idea whether I am using the right laptop for my high performance computing tasks.

Have a good day,

tk421
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