Playing without using the CD all the time

[managarmr]

There exists a trick to get Masters of Orion 2 to play without the CD, by copying the contents from your original CD to your hard-disc into a named directory, modifying a certain file, that the game henceforth believes that the named directory is the cd.

Voila, you protect your original CD against scratches, and the game plays faster (hard-disc much faster than CD). PLus, if you are on journeys you only need your laptop to play, and do not have to carry the CD around as well.

Is there a similar trick possible for Railroad Tycoon 2 (both games are about the same age), anybody who knows?

[Gwizz]

I've not heard of a no disk start for RRT2.

I just make a disk copy of the original disk to start the game and pack the original away for save keeping. 

[Hawk]

Doing a Google search using the following search term "railroad tycoon 2 no cd" (without the quotes) turns up several possibilities, depending on which version of the game you have.

Just make sure if you download one of these cracks you scan it for malware before you use it.

[cogeo]

You can also try installing Paragon CD Emulator. The free version works fine for me.

It creates (emulated) CD "drives", so that your computer thinks you have the CD in your drive. Of course the CD images are stored in your HD.

Only "problem", the music volume is fixed (non-adjustable), as this is produced by the emulator (while in the case of a real CD there's a cable connecting the CD to the sound system), so you have to adjust the sounds volume ingame (to specify the music/sound volumes ratio), and the master sound on your PC (to specify the overall sound volume). But I think you can live with this.

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Another problem I have met with running RT2 on newer systems is that it's too CPU-hungry. Your PC is not very much responsive when you run RT2. The best way to overcome this is run the Task Manager and set the priority of the RT2 process to "Below Normal". Then it's OK.

But this may be a little inconvenient (to do all the time), so I have made a small program which launches RT2_TSC.EXE and sets its priority to the "Below Normal" level. All you have to do is install this program and create a shortcut to it (sorry, no installer); but this must be done only once. I could make this available to you, if anybody is interested.