Burning on PC and iso manipulation

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2010, September 2 - 2:49am

schtolteheim

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Joined: 2010 Aug 30

Burning on PC and iso manipulation

I finally got a game running on my Mac which I had burned on PC.
Is selecting HFS as 'image type' in Nero the most crucial part?
I succeeded with 'Jewels of the Oracle' but then I failed with 'Shivers' using the same method.
The Shivers CD got spat out like a foreign object with the usual message.
Then I checked the files on the iso. There are 'data' files 3 to 20 and they're all empty; is that normal?

This whole burning affair is so frustrating, and some time soon I'll break the next busted CD in half; and I mean I'll be doing it affectively in that moment. No matter what, there is a lot of plastic to be disposed already.

Last thing I burned another game on a 870MB CD-R and my Mac took 2 minutes to recognise the game; and only the first time at all, nevermore after that.
CD-RWs are treated by the Mac like paper it seems; no reaction at all.
---

Now I wondered if it is necessary to spend a whole CD for isos that aren't even 100MB. The 'Alone in the Dark' trilogy for instance fits easily on one CD. And if these three games do not demand the proper disc in drive whilst playing, then it should work, shouldn't it?
I'd only need to know how to extract the files within the .iso and .img, or somehow remove that barrier. After that everything is to be wrapped up into an iso of one's own. Is that feasible?

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2010, September 2 - 4:21am

Protocol 7

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Joined: 2010 Aug 7

If you want to avoid burning isos all the time, in most cases you can just mount them using either Toast or this: http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/virtual-dvd-romcd-utility The idea is similar to virtual drives like Daemon Tools on the Windows side. If you're downloading on PC because your Mac doesn't have a burner then this should cut out a lot of your trouble.

You could also use CDRWs so you don't "waste" a cd on a small game. I only use ImgBurn to write image files. If it tells you the image is invalid it's because it technically is. The filesize should be evenly divisible by either 2048 or 2352 but sometimes the image isn't the correct size. In this case I use IsoBuster to extract it to a new iso. This adds the necessary padding to the end of the file to get the legal size.

2010, September 2 - 12:45pm

MCP

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Joined: 2010 Mar 12

I never burn CDs. Never. It's a waste of plastic. Old CD-ROM drives wear out easily and often weren't compatible with CDRs in the first place. Newer computers will drive you insane trying to get the job properly done just as much as the old machines did. Either use an emulator, or max out your vintage computer with lots of memory and hard drive space and get it networked to move big files back and forth. Or set it up to use flash media for transferring big files.

It's 2010 already. Burning CDs is a waste of time and resources.

2010, September 2 - 5:01pm

(Reply to #3) #4

bertyboy

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Joined: 2009 Jun 14

I agree totally,

but i do have 3 caveats:

some people, rather sensibly, prefer to backup what they have downloaded. Burning to CD is hust one option
some games require a burned CD to be inserted, ie. those with an Audio CD part, although in the days of Mac OS 8 and 9, this was very, very rare. Toast was usually good enough to mount the image and fool the game.
"It's a waste of plastic" - plastic is of course already a waste product from the oil industry. Like all the hooha over saving plastic carrier bags, if it's not made into carrier bags the oil industry has to dispose of it another way.

10 years ago I'd burn everything to CD, but now it just lives as disc images on a 1TB drive with backups of those I don't have the original media for on DVD-R (which now cost the same price as CD-R. 100 CD disc images fit on about 8-10 DVDs, rather than 100 CDs. I've only kept the CD-Rs for those games that require the CD inserted, ie. Age of Empires, Dungeon Siege.

2010, September 2 - 6:26pm

Euryale

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Joined: 2009 Jul 22

I have burned all my CD´s and backups -ISO´s- using my PC,
and work perfectly with real Macs and emulators,
example:
Carmageddon with the Audio part, Flashback with the 3D movies included, Unreal, etc..
I use Alcohol 120% but never experimented with 870MB CD-R CD´s

-actually I´ve never seen those 870Mb CD´s in real life-

I don´t use NERO.

2010, September 2 - 10:56pm

(Reply to #5) #6

schtolteheim

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Joined: 2010 Aug 30

Please Euryale, could you give me instructions as to how the burning process has to be configured?
In Alcohol do you have to choose HFS to make it work; or anything else? Do you change .toast to .iso or whichever file format Alcohol uses?
I know there are a whole lot of options but it appears most of them are not important for a layman.

I really have no other way to get the games on my Mac, it only has an 800MB hard disk to boot.

2010, September 2 - 11:07pm

Protocol 7

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Joined: 2010 Aug 7

You don't have to choose anything in Alcohol. Just choose the iso/toast file and burn. Toast and iso are the same file, the only difference is the file extension.