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[Expack2]

As some of you may be aware, I have, with the permission of both The Fifth Horseman and Ermuli, been working on converting Ermuli's ISO Cellar games to work without the need for their respective CDs and be uploadable to Abandonia without using any technical wizardry on my part (since I have none ) . I've had some successes, including Turok 2 and The Lost Vikings 2, but I've been having trouble with some which, in my mind, shouldn't really be a problem, as well as others which are just a pain. Here are some I'm most interested in getting working:

1. Scorcher and Saban's Iznogoud

   I don't know why these DOS games are giving me trouble - especially since all the info necessary to play them are copied to the hard drive during installation! It's like the game expects to see Redbook audio along with the game data on the disk because whenever I copy the contents of the CD into a folder and use DOSBox to mount it as a CD, the game doesn't 'see' it and asks for the CD. It doesn't matter what CD emulation options I choose for DOSBox or whether I apply the original disk's label to the mounted CD.

2. Uprising 2

   This game flat-out defies any attempts by third-party no-CD patches to render it usable without the CD. Even with all the game's necessary assets - including videos - copied to the appropriate places in the Uprising 2 folder on my Windows XP computer's virtual hard drive (my copy of Windows XP is run virtually through VMware Player).

3. Non-DOS games which lack third-party no-CD patches and whose CDs contain content (MPEG-1, MOV, WAV, Smacker, proprietary content containers, etc.) which prevent compression to less than or equal to 150MB.

   Yeah...the above mouthful pretty much says it all. This section is hit-and-miss; for example, for Army Men - Air Tactics, the game can be run without the CD by copying everything to the game's folder. However, I found when I tried to remove the bulky WAV music files - or any other file, for that matter - the game required the CD. Fortunately, I was able to replace the music files with empty files named exactly the same. Also, for another example, when I tried to downsample the Smacker videos for Uprising, the game refused to play them; therefore, I was forced to rip them.

If anyone would be kind enough to give some advice or tips on how to get around these problems, I'd really appreciate it, as it might allow me to successfuly make more of Ermuli's ISO Cellar games run without their respective CDs and be uploadable to Abandonia!