Alcohol 120% Anyone heard of this?

A buddy of mine told me he got this program for his notebook/desktop called something along the lines of Alcohol 120%. He said its a program that basically rips the entire CD and stores it on your hard drive so essentially he could install all his PC games and store them on his hard drive so he would not have to swap CDs all the time. I have yet to see it in action and it sounds like there could be drawbacks to having all your games loaded on your hard drive. Im curious as to if anyone has heard of this, and if its worth looking into? (i hate swapping game CDs myself) And also if it just basically took up hard drive space equal to two times the single installation. Thanks for any info you all can offer up on this.
~Lcpl Bekker

 

All what it does is copy CDs/DVDs or create images of them (like nero). And then it creates virtual drives (like nero or daemon tools which is free) to load the images into them. So nothing really new. It's just that it has some methods of bypassing copy protections to allow copying.

I haven't used it in ages so something might have changed since then

 

It is still the same. The nice thing especially for a laptop is that you can create a disc image and run a game that requires the CD off the hard drive. I used to do this all the time so that I didn't have to have the discs out...since only had 1 cd-drive. Nice program.

 

**** i'm gonna have to hit that up....

 

An even better idea is to utilize a program called Mini-Image Ripper (MIR). It doesn't work with every game, but it seems to work with a majority of Safedisc protected games. You can find it here.

After you create your image file with Alcohol 120%, open the image with MIR and it will generate a mini-image. Whereas the initial image of your game was 700MB or even 4GB, the mini-image file generated by MIR is merely ~26MB.

You then mount this image on a viritual drive (using Alcohol 120%, Nero Image Drive, etc...), and it enables you to play your game without having the original disc in the drive.

NOTE: This only works after performing a FULL INSTALLATION of your game. Your computer does not actually access any data from this image file, it solely tricks your computer into thinking the disc is in your cd-rom drive. There are a lot of different types of disc protections out there, so don't get frustrated if this doesn't work for your game. You may just need to do some research and utilize another method. The site linked above offers a whole bunch of different software apps, covering a lot of various approaches to accomplishing this.

2nd NOTE: I do not condone piracy. This virtual image method should only be used by those who own original copies of the game disc(s).

 

sagebrush,

Haven't heard of the one before I might have to try that one. Would be nice to not have to have the discs when I go to LAN parties...just a hassle. The fact that it conserves that much disk space is awesome.

Great Recommendation! +REP

 

Yeah, I use sagebrush's method quite often. It works great

As far as Alcohol 120%, I love it. But let's be honest, it is really only so popular because it is the bootlegging king :/

 

I just wanted to say that alcohol can be only obtained in max 96% or so water solution (if we talk about ethanol of course), and 120% if ever existed would probably kill most of us.

Cheers,

 

Alcohol is a wonderful program. The only downside is some games won't let you run off a mounted image (like BF2). I'll also have to look into that MIR program...

 

try sd4hide. This program allow you to play games when you mounted them with nero. Just run this program and you won't be prompt enter cd message.

 

Alcohol 120% is a great program. I have two virtual drives right now with two games in them. Then I just keep BF2 in the real drive. Works great. Now I don't have to worry about CDs.
Tim

 

Well I sometimes use Alcohol for making backup images, but for mounting them I prefer Daemon Tools.

Regards, VidKo

 

I was just wondering, what is the advantage of Alcohol 120% versus Daemon Tools. I've been using Daemon tools for a while and like it.

 

Daemon Tools is only a virtual drive, Alcohol 120% is also an image maker.

Regards, VidKo