CD Games... Without the CD...

Hi all,

I travel around with a netbook a lot at the moment (my trusty old Asus 904HD) and i was wondering something - is there a way to play my old PC games (and i mean OLD lol - Sim City 2000, Dune 2000, Diablo etc.) without the CD drive plugged in? I find them a great way to pass the time whilst travelling, but to be honest, having to hook up my external CD/DVD player to allow me to 'play from disk' is a little frustrating.

Is there a way (and is this 'allowed') to put the entire contents of the DVD's/CD's onto the hard disk, and then run the games from there? I have plenty of HDD space free and it would be great to be able to use that and run the games just from the unit (and possibly save power/extend battery life if i'm not having to use an external drive to play)

Are there specific programs/techniques to doing this?

Any help is greatly appreciated

There are ways to do this, but it's not "allowed" by the game makers as it by-passes their protection and need for a disk to be bought. Do some web searches on this you will find more info. This site does not give out info on hacking games even for "fair use". If you use a service like Steam, that is diskless and will allow you to run games fully legally, but you'd probably have to buy the games again.