State of Console Emulation - November 2013

[Jagosaurus]

No disc burning necessary. I need to check to see if BizHawk can actually use ISOs directly. Its been a while. I know Mednafen can.

Any one have any luck getting digital disc images to run (no disc burning) in Ootake, BizHawk, or Magine Engine?

Trying to avoid mednafen, but if it is the only option for booting digital disc images, I'll dive down that rabbit hole.

[Sarge]

I often use virtual CD drives like Daemon Tools or Magic ISO for that kind of stuff. It also helps for old PC games when I don't want to deal with discs.

[fastbilly1]

Dtools became a bit of a mess on anything after Win7. But if you are running Win8 or 10 you have a built in virtual disc drive.

[Jagosaurus]

Yeah I've use Dameon as well, but some of these emulators apparently won't load that way. They're looking for a retail or burned disc. That's what I'm trying to avoid, buying physical copies or burning CDRs in 2017.

One of the guys over at Atari Age let me know the oXbox TG16 mednafen actually supports booting digital CD images. On my list to try that & report back.

[racketboy]

Dtools became a bit of a mess on anything after Win7. But if you are running Win8 or 10 you have a built in virtual disc drive.

Interesting! Does it work the same way as Daemon? I haven't used Windows past 7.
Is there anything similar on OSX?

[samsonlonghair]

Dtools became a bit of a mess on anything after Win7. But if you are running Win8 or 10 you have a built in virtual disc drive.

Interesting! Does it work the same way as Daemon? I haven't used Windows past 7.
Is there anything similar on OSX?

There is!

Believe it or not, OSX has had the ability to mount virtual drives for about fifteen years. Of course, Apple wants you to do it their way. The preferred format for a disc image in OSX is a .dmg file. Don't worry though. OSX can also mount .iso files as well. All you have to do is double-click a .dmg file or .iso file to mount the virtual drive in OSX. Then you may notice a new drive on your desktop or on the navigation sidebar in any finder window. I attribute this to the "it just works" apple design philosophy. Mounting a virtual disc is so simple that you wouldn't realize that OSX can do it if you weren't trying.

But wait! Occasionally you may download a disc image with some kind of funny or proprietary encoding. If they don't open up with a simple double-click operation, then you do have another option. Go to Applications --> Utilities --> Disk Utility. Once you launch disk utility, you will have more options, more flexibility, and more power. I could go on a tangent about Disk Utility, but I might save that for another day.

One final note, if you have trouble with a disc image with an oddball file extension such as a .toast file, you can also try simply renaming the file with a .dmg extension to satisfy Apple's insistence on doing everything Apple's way.

[chuckster]

This is good stuff. I've been using Dtools on Win10 since I upgraded without issue, I never considered Win10 may have virtual drives of it's own. I'll tinker with it tonight to see if I can trim some fat off my boot drive.

[racketboy]

Dtools became a bit of a mess on anything after Win7. But if you are running Win8 or 10 you have a built in virtual disc drive.

Interesting! Does it work the same way as Daemon? I haven't used Windows past 7.
Is there anything similar on OSX?

There is!

Believe it or not, OSX has had the ability to mount virtual drives for about fifteen years. Of course, Apple wants you to do it their way. The preferred format for a disc image in OSX is a .dmg file. Don't worry though. OSX can also mount .iso files as well. All you have to do is double-click a .dmg file or .iso file to mount the virtual drive in OSX. Then you may notice a new drive on your desktop or on the navigation sidebar in any finder window. I attribute this to the "it just works" apple design philosophy. Mounting a virtual disc is so simple that you wouldn't realize that OSX can do it if you weren't trying.

But wait! Occasionally you may download a disc image with some kind of funny or proprietary encoding. If they don't open up with a simple double-click operation, then you do have another option. Go to Applications --> Utilities --> Disk Utility. Once you launch disk utility, you will have more options, more flexibility, and more power. I could go on a tangent about Disk Utility, but I might save that for another day.

One final note, if you have trouble with a disc image with an oddball file extension such as a .toast file, you can also try simply renaming the file with a .dmg extension to satisfy Apple's insistence on doing everything Apple's way.

Thanks -- I should have known the DMG/ISO thing -- I've actually done that a couple times for software
Should file extension renaming work for just about anything? What about CDI, MDF, BIN/CUE, things like that?

[samsonlonghair]

Interesting! Does it work the same way as Daemon? I haven't used Windows past 7.
Is there anything similar on OSX?

There is!

Believe it or not, OSX has had the ability to mount virtual drives for about fifteen years. Of course, Apple wants you to do it their way. The preferred format for a disc image in OSX is a .dmg file. Don't worry though. OSX can also mount .iso files as well. All you have to do is double-click a .dmg file or .iso file to mount the virtual drive in OSX. Then you may notice a new drive on your desktop or on the navigation sidebar in any finder window. I attribute this to the "it just works" apple design philosophy. Mounting a virtual disc is so simple that you wouldn't realize that OSX can do it if you weren't trying.

But wait! Occasionally you may download a disc image with some kind of funny or proprietary encoding. If they don't open up with a simple double-click operation, then you do have another option. Go to Applications --> Utilities --> Disk Utility. Once you launch disk utility, you will have more options, more flexibility, and more power. I could go on a tangent about Disk Utility, but I might save that for another day.

One final note, if you have trouble with a disc image with an oddball file extension such as a .toast file, you can also try simply renaming the file with a .dmg extension to satisfy Apple's insistence on doing everything Apple's way.

Thanks -- I should have known the DMG/ISO thing -- I've actually done that a couple times for software
Should file extension renaming work for just about anything? What about CDI, MDF, BIN/CUE, things like that?

I don't think that it's quite THAT easy. The rename trick only works when the formatting is right, but the filename is proprietary for no good reason. I use that as my last resort just because I have nothing to loose. It's not super reliable.

Disk Utility would be my first option. If I can't make it work in Disk Utility, I would google a file convertor to turn it into an .iso file.

[Jagosaurus]

Well I got Magic Engine running Hu card ROMS. I'm pretty impressed.

I will eventually attempt a CD game iso via a virtual mount program.