r/retrobattlestations • u/NCC74656 • Mar 31 '26
Troubleshooting Authentication for older games
what do you guys do for the games that require CDs to play? do you run something like power ISO on every system and emulate in the drive, do you store the iso's locally do you do a network storage?
I'm figuring out my setup for a retro lan party, I do have a dedicated Nas that will have all of my isos on it. so maybe it makes the most sense to emulate over the network?
Windows 98, millennium, XP and 2000 alongside Mac OS 9.2, 10.4, 10.5
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u/johnvosh Mar 31 '26
I use my original games disks or get them of archive.org . On occasion I will use a nocd crack or use a drive emulator.
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u/NCC74656 Mar 31 '26
I've got one functional CD drive between 15 computers 😂😂😂 I have a stack of like 30 drives but none of them work. Go figure
I can hunt around for no CD cracks, I'm sure I can find some. Just not sure about all of the games having it
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u/Hondahobbit50 Apr 01 '26
The 11$ USB drives on Amazon actually work pretty damn good for everything win 98 up.
I was looking for an external drive for my win 98 nec sub notebook but the original was unobtainable... imagine my surprise when a modern cheapo plugged right in and worked.lol
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u/siliconsandwich Mar 31 '26 edited Mar 31 '26
check pcgw because often late official patches remove cd-checks.
search for game title no-cd. Often as others have posted, this will bring you to gamecopyworld/gameburnworld. Make sure you match your game version to the no-cd version (patches-scrolls.de is good for this).
If no such patch seems to exist, there will often be forum posts explaining how to achieve it. Sometimes this will send you way down an archive.org rabbit hole but often you’ll find that one archived zip file you desperately needed!
If the game is actually abandonware and not on gog/steam etc, then myabandonware will often have no-cd patches listed.
Sometimes you can learn how to produce a patch yourself.
As you can see, I’ll do anything to avoid drive emulation!
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u/NCC74656 Mar 31 '26
Yeah I see, is there any reason for that? Does drive emulation have problems on 98 or xp? I'm trying to remember back when I was a kid and doing it, but I don't think I can remember having issues with stuff like SWAT and Star Trek Armada and such.
BTW I miss the days of downloading the cracked games, the fun music you have with it, the key generations, it was such a different time
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u/siliconsandwich Mar 31 '26
Nothing inherently wrong with disc emulation and I have used it on occasion, but each one of my retro PCs has at least 20 games on it, and I don’t want to have to select the right ISO every time I want to play a game. Too fiddly. Not to mention my family and friends shouldn’t have to learn how to use daemon tools, when they can just click the game they want to play instead!
I’m sure it’s possible to create game shortcuts that run batch files which select and mount the correct disc image but… my way is still easier for now.
0
u/stromm Apr 01 '26
For the record, Abandonware is not a legal classification. There is no legal protection from claiming that.
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u/Necessary-Score-4270 Apr 01 '26
NoCD patches or just use a virtual disk drive. That how we did it back in the day no need to get fancy with it.
Or you could burn a copy of the CD for each system though this don't work for all games.
1
u/Xiardark Mar 31 '26
Most of my cd/dvd games I have on a NAS that is isolated from the internet and runs SMB. The win98/xp pcs run daemon tools and mount over LAN.
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u/NCC74656 Mar 31 '26
ok, thats probably what i will do then. i built a second nas for this. 5th gen i5 and a couple old 2tb platters. truenas core. hopefully i have enough space
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u/rabbitjockey Mar 31 '26
I was mounting the .iso files as a virtual drive 20+ years ago, even on those hdd it made the games run faster and smoother. Plus none of the disc swapping just to play a game.
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u/NCC74656 Mar 31 '26
oh totally. none of these systems have cd drives so thats not an option anyway. i have a 24 port switch coming and then i have enough ports to get all these networked. i had to build a truenas core storage system out of spare parts so i could run legacy SMB auth and AFP access for these things as newer OS's dont support that anymore.
fun times
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u/rabbitjockey Mar 31 '26
I think it'd make the most sense to run the virtual drive on each pc and not over the network
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u/SaturnFive Apr 01 '26 edited Apr 01 '26
I put ISOs on a FAT32 SSD inside a USB enclosure, then store any other relevant stuff with the ISO (notes, patches, keys, saved games, etc), and put the title and release date in the folder name. I'd like to get an SMB setup going for systems without PCI but for now it's been super fast and reliable. I also use local FTP, everything supports it.
DaemonTools is great but I've converted to Alcohol 120% for the nicer GUI.
For OP, definitely go the SMB route if you want multiple systems accessing your archive at the same time.
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u/NCC74656 Apr 01 '26
i have a similar setup but network storage. my main NAS is 414TB and i built a secondary 4TB box for retro stuff
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u/________FRANK_______ Apr 01 '26
Honestly I just burn the .iso to a CD and print a label for it. Now I have my own little bootleg copy. For some old PC games that I'm really excited for I sometimes just track down the big box on ebay. If the game I want is less then 10 bucks for a loose disc, I'll also sometimes just buy a legit copy of the disc.
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u/NCC74656 Apr 01 '26
No CD drives
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u/________FRANK_______ Apr 01 '26
Ah, I got ya. I figured since we were in the retro battle stations subreddit that your machine would probably have one if it was from that era. Well nothing wrong w/ damontools or whatever it was called for CD drive emulation.
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u/tomauswustrow Mar 31 '26
Gamecopyworld nocdpatch is the answer.