The below info is about 12yrs old so mabye thing have changed since then but likely not:

I mostly used the below two and if those didn't work I used a crack. Anything beyond that would require too much effort. Also you may make a successfull backup but it's not a backup if you can't use it and in alot of cases the copy protection was buggy itself so the game refused to still work with a physical CD or the game copy protection wouldn't work with Daemon Tools. You are better off using cracks.
Alcohol 120% v1.9.5.3105 (Last version for 9x and newer than Daemon Tools, requires purchase. Activation still works if you bought it back in the day)
BlindWrite 6. (Haven't kept up with this but this is the last version I used back when I made all my images years ago.

Use ClonyXXL to scan the CD, then:

The below may require also changing different options in the software and additional steps:
Alcohol
BlindWrite 6
Discdump/Fireburner
Padus DiskJuggler

I personally use CloneCD/CloneDVD with my games and mount those CCDs. Seems to work fine in my case, dunno how DT347 would behave with them on Win98 but VirtualCloneDrive's fine. These are probably different names by now.

There's also the thing about cloning a protected disc, it'll take a while to crawl past the intentional bad sectors.

leileilol wrote on 2020-02-08, 15:33:

I personally use CloneCD/CloneDVD with my games and mount those CCDs. Seems to work fine in my case, dunno how DT347 would behave with them on Win98 but VirtualCloneDrive's fine. These are probably different names by now.

There's also the thing about cloning a protected disc, it'll take a while to crawl past the intentional bad sectors.

I can clone a CD/DVD in half an hour in Windows 10 using all sorts of software but the few tools I used in WIndows 98 are veeeeery slow. As in 10 hours to rip one CD slow.

I'll check out the software mentioned here - the hard part is always (a) discovering which version runs in Windows 98 and (b) then finding that version somewhere on a non-dodgy website.

I use a Windows 98SE Pentium III for all of my retro DOS and Windows gaming. I use PowerISO to make images of my games. I use it on Windows 10 but it's also compatible with Windows 98 so if you're wanting to make the images on Win98 itself, you can do so. It just takes a little bit longer than it does on Windows 10.

I've been using Alcohol 120 for years now as my go to.

How do you all deal with games that use CD audio? Some work when you're using Daemon and you turn on digital audio (believe that's a checkbox in Control Panel/Multimedia?), but many don't and I STILL have to use a physical disk to have CD sound (there's other hacks I've tried as well and still nothing works for them all.

It also doesn't help that in just under a month I've already had TWO broken CD drives...so these really aren't going to last us forever (and I'm coming from the video game console world, where pretty much every single system which uses optical discs has been hacked or an ODE - optical drive emulator has been developed, so I still can't comprehend that we have this issue in 2020 for PC's).

red_avatar wrote on 2020-02-08, 15:39:

I can clone a CD/DVD in half an hour in Windows 10 using all sorts of software but the few tools I used in WIndows 98 are veeeeery slow. As in 10 hours to rip one CD slow.

Isn't the problem that many of these copy protection methods use bad sectors that the drive will repeatedly try to read?

Dochartaigh wrote on 2020-02-12, 21:14:

How do you all deal with games that use CD audio? Some work when you're using Daemon and you turn on digital audio (believe that's a checkbox in Control Panel/Multimedia?), but many don't and I STILL have to use a physical disk to have CD sound (there's other hacks I've tried as well and still nothing works for them all.

Not sure what hacks you're using, but often the problem is that the programs will only try to play CD audio from the first drive they encounter alphabetically. If you have say, a real CD-drive on drive D and a virtual drive on drive E, then you'll need to swap them.

Use Alcohol 120% FE (just remove the annoying adware it installs via registry keys)
You need a proper drive that can fast-skip read errors and do Data Position Measurement.

I use my modern PC with an LG WH16NS40 blu-ray drive to rip them, and it works fine.
Just run the Data Type Analysis tool on each CD and set the protection type. Make a list of what uses what kind of protection.

Then, install Alcohol 120% to your target PC and mount it via the virtual CD drive and enable the protection emulation the disc needs.

Jorpho wrote on 2020-02-12, 21:57:

Not sure what hacks you're using, but often the problem is that the programs will only try to play CD audio from the first drive they encounter alphabetically. If you have say, a real CD-drive on drive D and a virtual drive on drive E, then you'll need to swap them.

I believe they will actually automatically go to the first optical drive (I have 2x 120gb SSD's on my Win98 rig, so those are C and D), the Daemon 'drive' is E. I've tried this before I had the 2nd drive too and same problem. There's a ton of posts about this on this forum and others with no 100% solution. I still need to try the 'rip to OGG' audio format or whatever thing I've heard people mention (haven't had time to look up a tutorial and try that yet).

Dochartaigh wrote on 2020-02-13, 15:43:

There's a ton of posts about this on this forum and others with no 100% solution.

Short of patching the code (see for example https://web.archive.org/web/20151027064859/ht … 01_archive.html ), there's really no option aside from swapping the drive letters.

Dochartaigh wrote on 2020-02-12, 21:14:

How do you all deal with games that use CD audio? Some work when you're using Daemon and you turn on digital audio (believe that's a checkbox in Control Panel/Multimedia?), but many don't and I STILL have to use a physical disk to have CD sound (there's other hacks I've tried as well and still nothing works for them all.

It also doesn't help that in just under a month I've already had TWO broken CD drives...so these really aren't going to last us forever (and I'm coming from the video game console world, where pretty much every single system which uses optical discs has been hacked or an ODE - optical drive emulator has been developed, so I still can't comprehend that we have this issue in 2020 for PC's).

I'm a year late in giving a possible solution but here's what's worked for me regarding CD audio for anyone that is struggling with this issue today:

1. Make sure that the virtual CD drive is of the first letter among all of the optical drives on your computer.
2. Install the game using this virtual drive and make sure that the drive letter will stay the same when you'll be playing the game as it was at the time of installation. To set a static drive letter for your virtual CD drive, right-click My Computer then go to Device Manager and select your virtual CD drive from the list. Set the start and the end drive letter to the same letter (D: in my case).

Following these steps, I have never had any issues regarding CD audio with Windows and DOS games using Daemon Tools under Windows 98SE.

Hope this helps!

Alcohol 120% to this day disables Import Optimizations (a spectre/meltdown performance loss mitigation) in order for its virtual sata controller to work, i can't advocate its use anymore.