Virtual Drive 7 is a utility program that allows you to create disk images from audio and data CDs. For gamers, this means you can create a virtual CD of your favorite game, mount it instead of the actual CD, and then play the game without actually inserting the CD into your CD-ROM drive.
The first concern with a program of this type is compatibility. Several game and application CDs were successfully turned into virtual CDs, including:
Dungeon Siege
Freedom Force
Might and Magic IX
Create A Card Gold
Picture It! Publishing Platinum Edition
The Sims
Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast
E.T. Interplanetary Mission
E.T. Phone Home Adventure
E.T. Away From Home
Trainz
Streets & Trips 2001
Once you have created virtual CDs of your games, you can mount one or more of them from the tray application or from the Virtual Drive Manager. One virtual drive letter is normally added to your system, but you can add several more, so for those games with several CDs, you can actually mount all of them at the same time.
Creating virtual CDs takes quite a while. Intelligent copy mode, which attempts to create images from CDs that report incorrect volume information, is time consuming. The normal copy mode is much quicker. Since virtual CDs can take up an enormous amount of space on your hard drive, you can use one of two levels of compression, but compressing the images is very slow.
When mounted, a virtual CD acts just like the real CD would act when inserted. Autorun will activate, although for those CDs that do not have autorun capability, you can specify a program to run when the CD is mounted. Unmounting the CD is as easy as clicking the Eject button from the Virtual Drive Manager, or selecting Eject from the tray menu.
Since Virtual Drive 7 can handle all types of CDs, including CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, DVD videos, mixed-mode CDs, audio CDs, video CDs, ISO 9660 image files, and photo CDs, it is quite flexible and useful. It can create virtual CDs from audio CDs in a number of formats, including MP3 and WMA, and at a number of different sample qualities.
Besides the Virtual Drive Manager, Virtual Drive 7 includes Rapid Cache, which is supposed to increase the performance of your CD-ROM drive and virtual CDs. The included user's manual is quite exhaustive, and provides walk-throughs of most operations. Overall, this product does a great job of creating virtual CDs. If you have the hard drive space for virtual CDs, it is highly recommended.
