One of the more frustrating aspects of PC gaming is the need for any given title's original CD/DVD-ROM to sit in your CD/DVD drive if you want to play it, sometimes requiring you to swap it out for the next disc as you progress. This as much for copyright protection as it is for accessing game content (it ensures you actually own the CD for game you've installed), which is fair enough. It's no big thing for console gamers as plop & playing a specific game is exactly what a console is for, but since a PC is generally used for productivity and non-gaming entertainment as well as games--and accommodating multiple users at that--, you're often left with a stack of worn game discs lying amidst other CDs and assorted workstation paraphernalia.

Farstone Technologies' Game Drive 9.0 (alternately packaged as Virtual Drive 9.0) does away with CD swapping by allowing you to emulate additional CD-ROM drives on your PC with software that tricks your computer into thinking it has more hardware (200x hardware at that). From there, you can copy almost any (but not every) CD/DVD into a single, compressed disk "image" that you "build" then store as a file your hard drive. Through a browser-like interface and cataloging system, pre-configured "hotkeys" or simply by right-clicking a virtual drive or virtual CD/DVD, you then "insert" any given image and access it or have it accessed by your game. And since you can mock up to 23 additional drives, you can just leave it there, too.

Game Drive 9.0 also works for music CDs, burned CDs and DVDs and some store bought DVD videos--though none that are copy-protected using CSS (Content Scrambling System), which most DVD videos are, which would be a shortcoming if that were the point and you were a bootlegger, but it's not and neither are you. Are you?
 

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