Play real copies of disc based games with emulator

Hello Emulator Zone people!

I've searched, but not found any discussion regarding the use of emulators to play actual copies of disc based games. It seems like it should be a relatively strait forward matter once a given piece of hardware is properly emulated. To be more specific, when I saw "Load NeogeoCD From Drive _" under the emulation options in Nebula, I figured I could pop in my CD copy of Magician Lord, so long as I had the NeoCD.bin file in the roms folder. I was mistaken. Now I'm not sure that I interpreted the "Load Neogeo CD" function correctly.

Can anyone offer details to my specific situation? And more generally, I'd love to hear about your experiences playing CD based games on emulated hardware. On which systems can this be done?

Thanks.

Thats usually what it is, just popping in the disk you have and just playing it off of the drive. Sometimes though your disk drive isn't able to read it because it isn't up to par. What people usually do is find an ISO Image to download and play it off the image. (Correct me if im wrong.)

So it's the optical drive that usually serves as the limiting factor then. That's good to know, thanks.

If Neo-Geo CD games are pressed on ISO standard CD's I don't see why a CD/DVD drive would not be able to read them.

Usually its a case of the original media being damaged/scratched too much.

Did you make sure you have the right drive letter selected for the emulator to use?

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Originally Posted by Zach

If Neo-Geo CD games are pressed on ISO standard CD's I don't see why a CD/DVD drive would not be able to read them.

Usually its a case of the original media being damaged/scratched too much.

Did you make sure you have the right drive letter selected for the emulator to use?

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I did select the right drive letter. But I'm also confident that the disc is Ok, because I can play it as CD audio (a great feature of NeoCDs.) I'm going to try loading it again. Maybe I only thought I selected the right drive letter. I'll also try to do so with a selection of optical drives.

The only thing stopping you from seeing a CD is a copy protection, most of which is cracked these days. Sony for example does a lot of weird crap to protect there dics yet they are easily beat. In many case reproducing the disc is near impossible but ripping or seeing it in windows should not be hard to overcome.

The possibility that you drive is just not compatible suggests neo geo did something to fool cd drive readers. But I think this info would be known.

Could just be that the NeoCD was almost steam powered in terms of read speeds. A lot of modern drives have trouble reading media designed for early CD hardware because they simply don't run slowly enough.

I've given this another go. The problem may be simple after all. Nebula isn't recognizing my NeoCD.bin file, though I'm almost positive that it did previously. Regardless, the disc may not be loading simply because I have a bad NeoCD.bin file. I'll report back after some additional investigation.

That's an excellent point about the Neogeo CD drive being steam powered. With the exception of CD audio, nothing is read from a disc at 1X anymore.