If you have a legal copy of the game, you may rip an 'image' of the CD to your hard drive in ISO format. And then, you can use various programs to 'mount' that ISO as a virtual cdrom drive. In theory the game can't tell the difference between a mounted virtual drive, and a real cdrom drive with a cd in it.
In reality, it's hit or miss, some games detect it and fail anyways, some don't. Tools that are capable of ripping your CD to iso, and then subsequently mounting it include: PowerISO - Alcohol 120% - Daemon Tools - And there are of course the totally illegal ways of doing it - e.g. Attempting to bypass the protection of the game by varous devious means. That we are not allowed to talk about;). While some people consider ripping CD's to ISO format to be piracy, I personally do not. The reason is that there are a number of legal advantages to running your games via ISOs instead of keeping the physical CDs: - ISOs can serve as a means of backing up your games - cd's can get scratched / lost - ISOs are stored on your computer. They are always with you.
Mounted ISO files run much faster than CDROM drives, = better game performance - You can mount many virtual drives. Usually as many as you have drive letters for. Which means you don't have the 'please insert disk 2', 'please insert disk 3', 'please insert disk 263' etc. Of course, distributing that ISO to other people would be piracy. So you shouldn't do that.
Buy Age Of Mythology Digital
Okay, my friend and I are trying to get a LAN game of AoM going between my PC laptop and his Powerbook G4, and it's just not working. We'd tried doing the same with AoE 2 a couple of days ago and didn't have any luck then either, however, I know that we managed to get a LAN game going in AoE2 between his G4 and his old PC desktop system this summer. We've tried going through his wireless network, and through a direct crossover cable connect with no luck.
Adds a fourth mythology, the Atlanteans, to the existing Greek, Egyptian and Norse mythologies in Age of Mythology. A new single-player campaign will add yet another chapter to the expansive panoply of ancient folklore along with the addition of new scenarios.
We can see each other, we can ping, copy files, etc. Everything but the game connect works. A quick test with NWN works great, so obviously the problem lies somewhere with AoM/AoE.
So far as we know we're using the same game versions, although the Mac version of AoM out of the box doesn't report a version number. I find it hard to believe that the PC and Mac versions of AoE and AoM just aren't compatible, especially since I know we've managed to make it work with AoE in the past. We've turned off all firewalls so far as we're aware, and back home I can set up a LAN game between my laptop and desktop (both PCs) with no trouble at all, even with ZoneAlarm Pro running on both machines. Does anyone have any suggestions at all on how to make this work?
There seems to be no info at all on the net about this - whether it's possible or not, or how to make it happen if it is.