Chip Hitware 6 A/CHIP_HITWARE6_A.iso/tools/FakeDr/FAKEDR.DOC

Text File | 1996-10-10 | 11KB | 235 lines

INTRODUCTION
------------

FakeDr is a DOS program that simulates a CD-ROM drive with a directory of
a hard drive. Its intended purpose is to allow running of CD-based
software entirely from a hard drive. This may give you a speed advantage,
but it can also indicate that the CD-ROM is not the bottleneck of your system
if the program does not show a speed increase when run from a hard disk.

FakeDr has been developed because FakeCD (a similiar program) has certain
principal barriers that derive from its mechanism to emulate the CD-ROM.
FakeDr hooks itself into the hardware CD-ROM device driver and should there-
fore be indistinguishable from a real CD-ROM drive. Therefore it requires
MSCDEX or a similiar program to be loaded. The use of the accompanying
program InfoDr is also mandatory.

This is a BETA release of the program. It was tested with
MS-DOS 6.0, Novell-DOS 7.0, Windows 95 and some CD-based games. It works in
Windows 3.x since these Windows versions use DOS services to access the
CD-ROM. See the Windows 95 section if you are using this operating system,
any comments about the behaviour with other operating systems are welcome.

If you find any problems with FakeDr (does not install, does not uninstall,
gives wrong error messages, ...) send an e-mail message to

[e-mail]


HOW TO USE
----------

Place the files that come with this archive in a directory on your hard
disk. During examples I'll assume that this directory is in your PATH,
otherwise you must give the full path every time you want to run fakedr.exe
or infodr.exe.

When you have a CD-ROM that you want to run off the hard disk,
you must copy the content of this CD-ROM to a directory on your
hard disk. You may use any file managing utility or the DOS xcopy command:

Example:
xcopy e:\ c:\prog-cd /s

where e: is your CD-ROM drive and c:\prog-cd the destination directory.
Be sure to copy any hidden or system files that may be on the CD.

Then (or before the copying) you MUST run InfoDr. This program will copy
all the data that is on the CD-ROM but not in the files onto your hard disk
creating the 3 files fakedr.dat, fakedr.sec and fakedr.aud.

The syntax of the InfoDr command line is
infodr /H[elp] | /? | DIRECTORY [x]

/Help and /?
  will give you a short description of each option.

DIRECTORY
  The place where the fakedr.dat and fakedr.sec files will be put.
  Should be the hard disk directory where the files from the root
  directory of the CD-ROM are, because FakeDr will seek them there,
  but you can as well put them anywhere and copy them later to the
  place where they are needed.

x
  Drive letter (without colon) of CD-ROM drive that contains the
  CD-ROM. If this parameter is not given, the first CD-ROM drive
  will be assumed

In case the CD-ROM is very complex (many directories and many files)
InfoDr may fail due to memory problems and abort with a Runtime Error.
If this happens, I'd like to be informed (e-mail address see above).
I tested it with some shareware CDs (which were very complex) and InfoDr
worked just fine, so there SHOULD be no problems of this kind.

If other fatal problems occur, InfoDr will tell what happened. The reasons
will be that the CD-ROM does not comply with the ISO CD-ROM specification
or even with DOS restrictions (like MYST).

A message like
The file E:\EXAMPLE\TEST.}}} is not accessable.
is not fatal.
The emulation still works, but InfoDr thinks that the mentioned file can
not be accessed by normal means. If you can look INTO the file, InfoDr
is obviously wrong and I'd like to be informed for bug correction.


These 2 steps (copying the files from CD-ROM to hard disk and running
InfoDr) have to be executed successfully only once.
Whenever you want to run the program that was copied to the hard disk
you must run FakeDr. FakeDr is a TSR (memory resident) program. It
will need some 20K of memory during installation and 5 KB during
operation (plus environment) and can be loaded high (with command
"lh fakedr ...").


The syntax of the FakeDr command line is
fakedr /H[elp] | /? | /U[ninstall] | DIRECTORY [/L:x] [/A[udio]] [/P:DAT-DIR]

/Help and /?
  will give you a short description of each option.

/Uninstall
  will remove a previously installed FakeDr from memory. This may be
  impossible if some other TSR program was installed after fakeDr. You
  can have only one copy of FakeDr resident in memory at one time. If you
  want to use FakeDr with other parameters, you must first uninstall the
  old copy of FakeDr and then install the new one. If you have several
  CD-ROM based programs on your hard drive you can make batch files like

  fakedr c:\prog1-cd /l:e
  e:
  prog1
  fakedr /u

  This will load FakeDr and simulate the directory c:\prog1-cd as CD-ROM
  drive E:. After the execution of prog1 the resident copy of FakeDr is
  removed. You can later execute another copy of FakeDr to simulate the
  same directory or another directory.

DIRECTORY
  is the name of the directory that will be the root directory of the
  simulated CD-ROM drive. It may be specified as a full path
  (c:\games\kyr1-cd) or as relative path (..\kyr3-cd). The drive on
  which the directory resides may be a local or remote hard disk. It
  should work with a compressed drive. You can not use another local
  cd-rom drive in this place!

/L:x
  gives the drive letter (x) for the simulated CD-ROM drive. x must be
  a CD-ROM drive letter.
  If there is no /L:x parameter, FakeDr takes your first CD-ROM drive
  letter for x.

/Audio
  No emulation of cd-audio features. If the program issues commands
  to the cd-rom drive to play audio tracks, they will be passed to
  the real cd-rom drive. This allows the use of audio tracks which
  can not be emulated together with a speed advantage from FakeDr.
  A real cd in the cd-rom drive is required for this option.

/P:DAT-DIR
  In case you can not or want not to have the fakedr.dat/sec/aud files
  in the same place as the program files, you can specify another
  path for these files. This may be necessary if the hard drive with
  the program files is actually a remote cd-rom drive.

I recommend that you always use the same drive letter for your CD-ROM.
Some programs are run directly from the CD and have some configuration
files on a predetermined place on your hard disk (most often on drive c:).
These programs should not worry if they are started from different drive
letters each time you run them. Other programs copy a small number of
files to your hard disk at installation time and one of these files must
be executed to start the program. This way they can store config files and
(in case of games) savegames to a user selected place on the hard disk.
These programs must find the CD-ROM drive with their CD in it. Some programs
(Legend of Kyrandia series) use CD-ROM specific methods to find the CD-ROM
drive and they work with FakeDr if started from different drive letters each
time they are run. Other programs (Warcraft 2 and Dark Forces)
store the drive letter from which they were installed. If you start them
with FakeDr from a different drive letter they will not find their data and
refuse to run.

FakeDr uses extended memory (XMS memory) to have the data from fakedr.dat
readily available. This file should be small ( < 300 KB ). If you are
low on memory and the program complains about to less memory when run
with FakeDr, but works from the CD, you should check the memory requirements
for your program against the free memory after FakeDr is installed (with
DOS mem command). If it turns out that the memory required by FakeDr is
crucial, contact me. I'll try to make a version of FakeDr that requires
less memory and is only slightly slower.


Windows 95
----------

FakeDr is a utility that uses purely DOS-based methods to accomplish its
task. While Windows 95 is compatible with DOS, the advantage of protected
mode drivers for periphal devices turns into a disadvantage since FakeDr
wants to replace such a driver. Since it can replace only a DOS driver,
you'll have to include this DOS driver in your config.sys, together with
MSCDEX in autoexec.bat (MSCDEX.EXE for Windows 95 can be found in the
COMMAND subdirectory contained in the directory where you installed
Windows 95).

If you want to use a DOS program with FakeDr, you'd best have it run in
MS-DOS mode. To do so, open the folder where the program is located and
klick on the executable (.EXE or .BAT file) with the RIGHT mouse button.
Select PROPERTIES and choose the PROGRAM slider. Here click on the EXTENDED
button and select the USE MS-DOS MODE and USE CURRENT MS-DOS CONFIGURATION
boxes. (Note: The capital words are translations from the german Windows 95
version back to english. I'd like to get the original wording for the public
release (version 1.0), so someone not familiar with the process can easily
follow. The same is true for the following paragraph.)

If you want to use a Windows program with FakeDr (or don't want to run a
DOS program in MS-DOS mode), you must make the CD-ROM drive that will be
emulated (x in "/l:x" - FakeDr command line option) to be in MS-DOS compa-
tibility mode. Loading the DOS drivers as described above is neccessary, but
Windows 95 will often be smart enough the recognize the drivers and use
its own protected mode drivers instead. How this must be done depends on
what CD-ROM drive you have. It will probably include removing certain
devices from your current configuration in
DESKTOP/CONTROL PANEL/SYSTEM/DEVICE MANAGER
and rebooting. To find out if a drive is in MS-DOS compatibility mode,
open DESKTOP/CONTROL PANEL/SYSTEM/WORK PROPERTIES (the rightmost slider).
This slider will contain a list of all drives that are in MS-DOS compati-
bility mode.

There is currently a bug in FakeDr that will crash Windows 95 if the
hard disk with the emulated CD-ROM is in MS-DOS compatibility mode. See
above how to find out if this is true for a certain drive. I am working
on this problem.

CD-AUDIO
--------

Some games use audio tracks for music. This music is not in a computer
readable form. It was not copied to the hard disk with the other files (and
also not with InfoDr) and it can not be done (at least not in a form useful
for FakeDr). So you will normally not hear that music. FakeDr will however
make the program believe that everything is fine. If you want to enjoy the
game with full audio music but also want speed benefits granted by FakeDr,
add the /A switch to the FakeDr command line. FakeDr will then not emulate
the cd-audio requests from the game but pass them to the real cd-rom drive.
Of course you'll need the real cd-rom in the drive to use this feature.



I hope you will find FakeDr a useful program. If you have comments,
suggestions or bug reports, then send me an e-mail and I will (at least
try to) correct any errors.

Ingo Warnke
e-mail to:
[e-mail]