No. If the game works when you do this, it's already effectively DRM free. All you've done is copied the media on to another source. The media itself may have additional DRM on it, which you may need to remove in order for the copied media to work. While nobody is likely to care about you doing this, technically it violates the EULA and may also violate local laws and regulations.

You probably already knew this.

No, not really. CDs mostly existed for being a data transport when copying one of them wholesale would either be bigger than, or an uncomfortably large amount of space on the hard disk drive.

Remember, CD drives existed before most people were able to afford a large drive.

Until the early to mid 2000's, it was actually common practice to only copy some of the program files onto the hard drive and leave most of the game data files on the CDs.
This was not considered copy protection at all. You need to remember that hard drives were a lot smaller 20 years ago. In 2000 you were lucky to get a new stock computer with a 20gb drive even if 100gb drives were available in 2001. In 1997 4gb was considered standard for stock computers.
So as a space-saving measure the games tried to copy the minimum amount onto the hard drive as a CD-ROM held 650 or 700mb of data. Some games even used disc swapping with CDs. Off the top of my head Final Fantasy VII &VIII, Baldur's Gate I and II, Planescape Torment, and many others.
Also a lot of older games from the '90s and early 2000's had options to install "minimum" "normal" and "full" installs. Generally a "full" install meant you didn't have to have the CD in the drive or only have one CD in the drive, while "minimum" meant most of the content was on the CD. ,
That did not mean the games were copy protected, and nobody considered needing the CD in the drive to be copy protection after 1997 when burners became common. They used other methods.
Yes, I'll grant that some companies considered needing the CD to be in the drive to be an effective form of copy protection in the early 1990's before home CD burners were available. However it was generally more about saving hard drive space and taking advantage of the fact that the average hard drive in the 1990's was measured in megabytes instead of gigabytes while CDs had a whopping 650mb.
As late as 1995 computers were coming with hard drives with as little as 80mb hard drives. Then there was an advancement in storage to make larger drives cheaper and drives up to 1gb started appearing in stock computers.

Tl;DR? Requiring the disk in the drive with no protections against copying the disk was about saving hard drive space, not copy protection. It made sense 20 years ago and made a lot of sense 25 years ago when backing up your hard drive onto a couple CD-Rs was a cheap and easy backup plan. The computer I got in 1997 could do that with 4 700mb CD-ROM (at least until I replaced its 4gb drive with a 100gb drive around 2001).

Mhmm. This was quite the case most of the time, minimal copying and the like. Diablo 1 would copy about 4Mb or so of files and that's it, everything else on the CD.

Tomb Raider (original game) while being large, could be copied to the drive but wouldn't run in MS-DOS unless you used a tool to trick the program to think you were using a CD. A simple TSR program that changed the code and made a link between a directory and a new drive actually made this work as i recall.

Copy protection methods often also includes errors, bad sectors or even the FAT (File Allocation Table) to include bogus information, floppy drives potentially pointing to sectors way outside the drive's capability and even damaging your drive trying to copy it, and a CD like Dark Reign said it had 20Gigs of data on that 700Mb drive. Try to copy it all and you'd get 98% of the way there before it would just fail. Likely a few files had repeated sections in the FAT to make it huge, and a few sectors impossible to read or too far out to copy.

Naturally on GoG it's here, and it's mounted in the background when the game is booted up. (Though occasionally it will tell you to insert the CD when something goes wrong). Unless you're caught selling a copy of the disc, i doubt anyone can prove you did such a thing nor would it matter. Plus as you mentioned there's more things to a game than just copying it. Spore for example you had to have online activation, a number of games may go to Demo mode unless you put the right key in. And others, just won't work.

Mounting a virtual copy though can greatly speed up play of a number of older games.

One of the few things GoG gets right, is that the games they have packaged are mostly hassle-free.

Mhmm i remember Alcohol 120. I did D2 LOD that way too, though that was to preserve my disc more from use, AND so me and my GF could play at the same time on a local LAN.

As in me? I think this post of mine is legit. I had been wondering about it,

Not you. The one that wants your ban for whatever reason.

Some people are like that, i was discussing deleting a few files from the Sea of Thieves folder in the Official Sea of Thieves discord to see if it helped the person solve his download troubles.. half of the chat room at the time including the mod virtually cried out "thats illegal"... i said going into your folders and deleting your files isn't illegal.

I got muted for it.. Yea thats how fookin stupid people are. I was damn polite too, but even disagreeing with people will have them pull out the ban hammer rather than have their e-peen harmed.



I even got muted by the community manager there the first time, as i said;

"that was bad advice, you are here to help people, not be part of the echo chamber, he has a valid issue with his game crashing and all you could say is "don't horde your loot" like everyone else just did"

people on a damn power trip..

Just to clarify my position and a couple of other bits and pieces.

I reported this thread to a a blue (smollest light) as I believe this thread was another attempt by geralt at trolling.

In the gog forums Code of Conduct there are specific rules on piracy posts. Discussions on piracy are generally allowed. Advocating piracy is not allowed. Geralt in this thread has detailed steps/methods involved for bypassing copyright authentification, also known as piracy. I would call that advocating piracy.

Even if you believe my interpretation of gogs CoC to be extreme or incorrect, I would hope and expect that you and others could at least agree that discussing detailed methods of bypassing copyright authentification on gog forums- the very company that is trying to champion devs and pubs to release here DRM free- is at he very least extremely uncool.

As is stands, smollest light has not responded to my PM regarding my report and indeed a previous complaint about this poster, so I believe that this posters behaviour is now acceptable on the gog forums, which means it's time for me to move on from this forum.

I am not going to respond to any more posts but don't let that you responding if you so wish.

Err what? What does this have to do with piracy? He isn't saying about handing it to friends. And US law allows you to make a backup copy of software/music/movies for your own purposes. Copying the disc locally to the computer and mounting it so the data can be accessed, how does that matter?

It's like complaining that someone is drinking water out of a plastic cup instead of a certified bought special plastic bottle with a name/logo on it. It's the same content, how you enjoy it doesn't matter.

I'm surprised for some '90s games.
Mounting a virtual copy of a couple games sped up the loading when I had a 4x or 12x CD-ROM in the '90s, but when the12X cd-rom broke and I replaced it with a 48x one I didn't notice much difference from playing off the CD-rom.
Granted this went away with 21st century ATA 66 or ATA 100, to say nothing of SATA, but we are talking "older games".

Also I want to clarify that when I said "no protections against copying the disk" I meant that if you took a standard CD copy program that would copy music and data tracks and copied the game disks, and this allowed you to install (a few copy protection schemes would let you play on backup copies once the game was installed but the program would fail if you reinstalled Windows and tried to reinstall the game from a backup CD/DVD as I found out the hard way) and play the game without issue, the game was not considered copy protected even if you needed to have a disk in the drive.
FFVII, FFVIII, and all the Infinity Engine games were like this.

That depends on how much data and how often it is being read, as a faster drive may require longer time to spin up and with Fallout's minimal install option that could have easily added up to a significant waste of time during gameplay as the disc was accessed at a rate that allowed the drive to spin down just before the disc was needed to be accessed again.

Mounting a virtual image or applying a NoCD fix also eliminates the risk of my discs dropping to the floor, which tends to happen from time to time no matter how careful I try to be, so nowadays I only need to worry about that when I want to play some of my games on native DOS.

Originally floppy disks and later CD/DVD discs falling on the floor, and when I move my chair to reach under the desk I hear a crunching noise is the primary reason I always look for cracks for my games so I am not playing on the original disk/disc.
Happened too many times for me not to be paranoid about it.
Something about the castors of my chair having a magnetic effect on falling media.

Oooooohhhhh. I HEARD that crunch from here! My sympathies, that happens a fair bit to me as well, and not only media.

DRM is just a more specific, nastier, messed up form of copy protection. All DRM is necessarily a form of copy protection; however it is true that usually DRM also includes some mechanism for the provider of the copyright to remove it at any time.

Personally, I lump them both into the same category, because they both interfere with legitimate users wishing to play a game they own. The fact that games are technically not "owned", only licensed, and this license may be revoked - that's an extra layer, sure, but if one solves the issue of copy-protection, then one generally also solves this issue as well (as in, if you can copy the installation of a game you bought infinite times without requiring any further verification, then this is no longer an issue).