rec.autos.simulators

Anyone tried using a progy called fakecd to emulate the cd rom so all cd
accesses are from the hard drive instead of the cd?

That would speed things up a little if it works, like nocdrom for gp2<G>

Mike.

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   13:52  on  01/17/98
   From sunny Herne Bay, Kent.UK.
   mailable also at

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Where can you get this utility from?

Steve and all-
    I just did a search with yahoo for fakecd, didnt take much notice of
the d/load site! I did give it a go though, I set a dir on a drive as
F1RS and xcopied all the f1rs cd files across to it then booted w95 to
the dos prompt, ran fake cd and then booted to w95.

Sure enough i now had 2 cdroms listed in explorer, my normal (I:) the
letter i had originaly installed f1rs sim from, and another (J:). I had
told fake cd that i wanted it to use (I) as its fake drive so w95 set
(J) as my "normal" cd drive.

I then spent an hour or two with my VERY limited w95 knowledge trying to
get it running right.

You had to still have the cd in the cdrom for f1rs to work but it didnt
access it like it usually does and yes it did seem quicker in the
loading of tracks, but for some reason i had to run the sim from
f1voo.exe in the fake cd dir for it to work right. You could eject the
cd from the drive after the initial run and it wouldnt ask for it again,
i even applied the patch to f1voo in the fake dir and it still ran ok.

I did try and install f1rs afresh from the fake cd but it wouldnt have
that, at this point i ran out of time and know how.

So what we need now is someone who really knows what they are doing to
get it right!

Any takers??

Email me if you cant find fakecd and i will mail it to you, its only 8K
zipped.  

--

   17:14  on  01/18/98
   From sunny Herne Bay, Kent.UK.
   mailable also at

   remove NO-SPAM to mail me.

writes
Fakecd I believe runs only for dos CD games. It is run (with the options
which come in the readme file See below with it) before the game is
started. I have tried it on dos based games ie Silent Hunter and its
great. You have to run it again afterwards to allow you to access the
normal cd drive.

HOW TO USE

First, you must copy the content of your CD-ROM to a directory on your
hard disk. You may use any file managing utility or the DOS xcopy
command:
xcopy e:\ c:\prog-cd /s /h
where e: is your CD-ROM drive and c:\prog-cd the destination directory.
Then you must run fakecd. fakecd is a TSR (memory resident) program. It
will need some 9K of memory during installation and less than 2 KB
during
operation (including environment) and can be loaded high (with command
"lh fakecd ...").

The syntax of the fakecd command line is
fakecd /H[elp] | /? | /U[ninstall] | DIRECTORY [/L:x]

/Help and /?
will give you a short description of each option.

/Uninstall
will remove a previously installed fakecd from memory. This may be
impossible if some other TSR program was installed after fakecd. You
can have only one copy of fakecd resident in memory at one time. If you
want to use fakecd with other parameters, you must first uninstall the
old copy of fakecd and then install the new one. If you have several
CD-based programs on your hard drive you can make batch files like

c:\utils\fakecd c:\prog1-cd /l:e
e:
prog1
c:
c:\utils\fakecd /u

This will load fakecd and simulate the directory c:\prog1-cd as CD-ROM
drive E:. After the execution of prog1 the resident copy of fakecd is
removed. You can later execute another copy of fakecd to simulate the
same directory in another drive or a completely different directory.

DIRECTORY
is the name of the directory that will be the root directory of the
simulated CD-ROM drive. It may be specified as a full path
(c:\games\kyr1-cd) or as relative path (..\kyr3-cd). The drive on
which the directory resides should be a local hard disk. It should
work with a compressed drive (tested with Stacker) but will probably
not work with a network drive. This is due to the mechanism used by
fakecd to make the directory look like a drive to DOS.

/L:x
gives the drive letter (x) for the simulated CD-ROM drive. x must be in
the range from A up to the drive specified with LASTDRIVE. It should be
an unused drive since if your simulated CD-ROM will be C: you will not
be able to access any files on your hard drive C: (which will probably
include your DOS commands, COMMAND.COM and maybe fakecd).
If there is no /L:x parameter, fakecd uses a default value for x.
If MSCDEX is installed, x will be your first CD-ROM drive letter. If
MSCDEX is not installed, x will be your first unused drive letter.

I recommend that you always use the same drive letter for your CD-ROM.
Some programs are run directly from the CD and have some configuration
files on a predetermined place on your hard disk (most often on drive
c:).
These programs should not worry if they are started from different drive
letters each time you run them. Other programs copy a small number of
files to your hard disk at installation time and one of these files must
be executed to start the program. This way they can store config files
and
(in case of games) savegames to a user selected place on the hard disk.
These programs must find the CD-ROM drive with their CD in it. Some
programs
(Legend of Kyrandia series) use CD-ROM specific methods to find the CD-
ROM
drive and they work with fakecd if started from different drive letters
each
time they are run. Other programs (Monty Python's CWOT and Dark Forces)
store the drive letter from which they were installed. If you start them
with fakecd from a different drive letter they will not find their data
and
refuse to run.

--
Anthony Starbuck

Hena