I have some old educational kids games that the kids still use. The stupid thing about these games is that they require the CD to be in the drive in order for them to run. Not a bad idea back in the days with small hard drives, but a royal PITA nowadays. Microsoft developers have created some extensions to Windows to help solve this problem.

The first is called ISO Recorder (referenced from this Microsoft article). It adds the ability to copy a CD to an ISO image (a file) on your hard drive. It's a very simple extension, and much more lightweight than installing something like Nero. There's a short tutorial that explains how to use it.

The next one is called Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP (referenced from this Microsoft Article). It allows you to "mount" an ISO image file and have Windows pretend it is a CD in a drive. I tried it on two ISO images. It mounted the one just fine, but locked up on the other one. I ended up installing & using Daemon Tools instead. It does the same thing, but is much larger & wants to install adware to help support the project, so be careful.

Finally, I had to reinstall the games from the ISO images so that the games knew to look at the "new drives" instead of the actual CD drive. There may be a way to update the configuration instead of reinstalling, but reinstalling from the ISO images is pretty fast anyway.

Hopefully somebody else will find this to be helpful.

I forgot all about these types of programs since it's been so long since I've used them. There was a time when I used a program that created a virtual CD drive just for the purpose you mentioned - some programs required the CD to be in the drive in order to run.

Always nice to be reminded

I use Alcohol 120, which adds a virtual drive and then lets you mount and unmount CD images to it.

I used DameonTools forever, but then as you said they added adware and I stopped using it. Now I use MagicDisc, link: here. Light-weight and hasn't failed me yet. I use it to mount cd's and dvd's.

One thing I really liked about Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP is that you could set up the drive mounts to be permanent. So I was able to make drive Z: always be one game, drive Y: always another, etc. It could be made persistent across reboots. This way my kids could just start up the game without doing anything special.

It appears that Daemon Tools does not have this as an option. Do any of the others?

Pretty sure alcohol works like that. I've used it for modern games that I didn't want to mess with the discs (and didn't have working cracks) and it worked fine across reboots w/o having to do anything special

I finally found a Virtual CD program that works for me: Virtual CloneDrive

It's freeware, and it doesn't try to install adware (like Daemon Tools), nor does it force you to install & use a toolbar (like Alcohol free version), and it works (unlike Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel).

There's an article here that explains how to use it to automatically mount the correct CD when you run any particular game. Works perfectly!

Found this nifty little article too:

How to Burn or Mount Almost Anything — For Free!

For REALLY old (DOS) games, don't forget about VDMSound.