an Installation menu to install any of the games on the cd. All Plug and Play.Also the CD Games that are designed to play from the CD'S will do so just thesame so all your Hard drive space isn't robbed.Q.   What exactly does CD-Ripped Mean?A.   It means that the program has been taken directly from the OriginalCD-Rom. This can mean many things. It may be 100% Exactly like the Originalor it may be only working parts of the program. I will follow this with some examples so you will get the Idea!(1) DARK Forces CD-Rip 50 Megs. This is the full version of Lucas arts DOOM    II Killer, Dark Forces. When you purchase this CD Title from the store    and proceed to install it, You will have 2 option's Minimal Install (5)    Megs or Full install (70 Megs). The instruction suggest that you do the    full install if you have the hard drive room because the game will play so     much better. The CD Rip is the Full 100% Installed version. The only    difference between this release on CD-Rom 17 and the Original CD Is that    you cannot do a minimal install and play off the CD-Rom drive.(2) Disc World (Psygnosis)  When this Original CD Game is purchased, It     contains about 30 Megs of Game and music, And 300 Megs of Digital Voice    files. The CD Rip from CD-Rom #17 contains everything except the 300 Meg    Voice files. When you install this CD-Rom Rip you need to set the sound    card configuration for Music but No Digital Speech sound card. That way    all Interaction is written to the screen for you to read instead of the    character actually speaking. This CD Rip is exactly like the Floppy disk     version.(3) X-COMM II Terror from the DEEP CD-Rom Rip. This is Exactly like the     Original store bought CD Rom. No Difference. It is a Major graphic and    sounds improvement from the Floppy version although game play is the     same.     The above three examples pretty much cover CD-Romm Rips. There have also been CD-Rom ripps released that are complete Abortions. They are soripped apart that they are almost impossible to play but I do not post theseon my filelists.Q.   Please explain how CD Rom Rips are packaged.A.   Will because of the vast storage capacity of CD-Roms (650 Megs) mostcompanies don't compress the files on the CD, And because Pirating CD-Romsis almost un-Heard of (Hehe) they don't use much protection. At most the onlyprotection I have ever seen is that the program actually looks to make surethe CD Is in the CD Rom drive. A simple CD-Rom Check Crack is all that is needed to defeat this. The easiest way to ripp a cd would be to PkZip the entire CD-Rom. Ie. PkZip.exe -R -P c:\game\ripoff E:\*.* example would createa file in the games dir of C:\ named ripoff.zip . Only problem here is thatfile could be huge, Like 50 Megs and most people don't have enough BBS Timein one session to download 50 Megs. Therefore we need to split the file intosmaller chunks. The size of a 1.44 Floppy seems to be the standard. This isnot done so as to put this rip on floppies but rather give you the ability todownload a few files each time you call the BBS. Also by using a program likeARJ.EXE we can get maximum compression as most cd's do not contain compressedfiles. There is a simple command line parameter that will ARJ Any CD-Rom, Fileor Groups of files into multiple .ARJ Files. As explained earlier in thisdocument when this is done it typical creates ARJ Data extension files asfollows.GAME.ARJGAME.A01GAME.A02GAME.A03ETC....... Each file being 1.44 Kb in size. There is other ways to do the ARJ but the bottom line is if you see files with extensions like .A01 or .001 .002 .003etc. The its probably ARJ Files. Q.   How do I go about taking these Data extension files and making the        game install or run?A.   The answer is lots of Hard drive space. To begin thou you need to Un Arj the files as follows.ARJ X -v -y GAME.ARJ d:\tempThe above example would Un-Arj and create an exact image of everythingthat was on the CD and do it in the Temporary directory on D Drive. You canthen Delete the .Arj, .A01 etc files to free up some hard drive space as youare done with these. Now you will most likely need to Install the game justas if you wer installing the game from the CD-Rom. In order to sucsesfullydo this you will most likely need to Substitute your D:\TEMP Directory foranother drive so that the Install program will seem to think its a CD-Rom drive and not the subdirectory of your D:\ Hard disk. Do the following.(1)  Make sure that the LastDrive command in the Autoexec.bat = Z(2)  From Dos Type   SUBST H: D:\TEMP  Where H: does not exist on your     system and D:\TEMP Is where you Un-Arjed to.(3)  Change directory to H: and type Install or Setup. Or if Its Windows     Load windows and Run Setup from the H: drive in Filemanager.(4)  Proceed as required but make sure that if give more than one Install     method, You choose Full install so that all files are installed to the     hard drive.(5)  After this is complete you can DEL all files in D:\TEMP or      Deltree d:\temp (6)  Try to run the game. If there is an error message, Cannot find CD-Rom     or C:\Game is not a CD-Rom drive ETC... Then you will need to Patch it     with a crack or whatever it takes. Read the .NFO Files on the 1st Zip     file for all information needed to get it going.   That's basicly all there is to it. Its pretty much common sense and will worththe effort to get these awsome releases working.Q.   I have come across some games that have .001 .002 .003 - .027 filesand when I try to un-Arj them I get a Not An ARJ File. Whats up!A.   Yup! Some Idiot group out there has decided to use Pkzip to Rippthe CD'S and then break them down using another program like Carve or Zipchucker pro. When done with Zip Chunker pro and that program is also on thedisk the it works pretty good. Just use Zip Chunker pro to reasemple all thefiles back to one huge zip file and then Unzip that file to the temporary directory. other than requiring more Hard drive space to get thru the installprocess there is not a problem with this.  The problem is with a programcalled CARVE.EXE. It seems a if the person was sucsesfull in Carving the monster zip file down into 1.44 Kbyte files but when we use Carve.exe to Putin back together it fails.Q.   OK so I have 29 Files with .001 thru .029 and CARVE.EXE wont put themback into one big zip file. What can I do.A.   Will its a Piece of Cake! (Hehehe) You may have to think about it forA while but this will work.  OK we are going to use the DOS Join Option withinthe COPY Command. If you want more information about the Dos COPY Commandtype Help Copy from any DOS Prompt.      We would like to join all of these 29 files together but DOS wontlet use type that long of a command line so we will join them 5 at a timeuntil we get 6 files then we will join the six into one. Confused? Justfollow along and I think you will get the Idea. The 29 files are namedGAME.001   GAME.002  ---------- thru GAME.029(1) From the Dos prompt type exactly line exactly pressing enter after each     line also make sure your current directory is where all the files are.     Also make sure you have enough hard drive space available.COPY /B GAME.001 + GAME.002 + GAME.003 + GAME.004 + GAME.005 NEW.001COPY /B GAME.006 + GAME.007 + GAME.008 + GAME.009 + GAME.010 NEW.002COPY /B GAME.011 + GAME.012 + GAME.013 + GAME.014 + GAME.015 NEW.003COPY /B GAME.016 + GAME.017 + GAME.018 + GAME.019 + GAME.005 NEW.004COPY /B GAME.020 + GAME.021 + GAME.022 + GAME.023 + GAME.024 NEW.005COPY /B GAME.025 + GAME.026 + GAME.027 + GAME.028 + GAME.029 NEW.006DEL GAME.*    ;(rem) FREE UP SOME HARD DRIVE SPACECOPY /B NEW.001 + NEW.002 + NEW.003 + NEW.004 + NEW.005 + NEW.006 FINAL.ZIPDEL NEW.*    ;(rem) FREE UP SOME MORE HARD DRIVE SPACE     At this point you will be left with one MONSTER File called Final.zipand if you typed everything correctly you can now Unzip that file to yourtemporary directory. Ie: D:\TEMP and then delete that BIG! .Zip file. Its a little more complicated but the end result is the same. If you don't use theDOS Command line history utility (DOSKEY) The start as it will save you a lotof time typing commands.(2)  Now go to the temporary directly and install the game.Q.   I install the CD-Rom Rips and even crack to CD Check but the gamewont run. It keeps saying that MsCdex isn't loaded and I do not have a CDRom in my computer so I cant load it. Is there anything I can do?A.   Sure! You need the file CDEMU2.COM Its a small MSCDEX Cd Rommdriver for network drives. That means it wont check your system to see if theirs a CD-Rom installed because it assumes it could be on another computeron A network. Just put the file in your Dos Directory and from the dosPrompt type CDEMU2 H: where H: is a Subistuted drive.  You could create a small batch file to load the game as follows.MD C:\temp1                  ;REM  Make phoney dir for substitute driveSUBST H: C:\temp1            ;REM  Substitute Phony drive for H:C:\DOS\CDEMU2.COM H:         ;REM  Load MSCDEX Driver for H:cd\Games                     ;REM  Change to the Game directoryGame.exe                     ;REM  Load GameSUBST /D H:                  ;REM  Remove Subistuted drive with /D SwitchRD C:\temp1                  ;REM  Remove Temporary directory (House Cleaning)NOTE:  MSCDEX does not have to point to the drive with the game. Its just that       the game will check to see if MSCDEX is running.Q.   The CD Games take so much hard drive space Isn't is just better to BUY The CD.A.   Will I always condone supporting the Software Authors but I don't believe your argument is Valid. I just purchased A 1.3 GIG Western Digitalhard drive for $325.00. It wouldn't take purchasing very many CD Rom gamesat $49.00 to buy a couple of them. Also If you buy A CD and it a piece ofshit game then your out. Getting it from me and you just delete it from yourhard drive and move on to the next one. Hell one thing is for sure. When a CD Rom game is 100% Installed to the Hard drive it plays much better and faster than when its loading scenes from the CD-Rom. Even Quad speed is slowcompared to a hard drive.Q.   What will we do when all of the CD Games are two big to put on theHard drive. when there over 100 Megs its not worth it.A.   That's why I now offer GOLD Series disks. These are disks that containmany CD Games on One CD-Rom. with some games as big as 600 Megs. That will bethe future for a while. As the CD Programs get bigger the price of blank CD'swill come down. At some point I believe we may carry our portable CD-Romdrives from house to house copying CD'S just as we did for years with floppydisks. If and when they introduce CD-Rom Disc based Protection like putting certain physical errors on the disc's then it could get interesting but fornow we change with the times and have FUN!      FINAL Comments for April 27 1994.     Commenting on past issues. Clone CPU Makers have finally caught up with INTEL. AMD Is selling more DX/4 100 Megz CPUs in one month than INTELwill sell is 6 Months. Cirix still hasn't caught on to much but after the INTEL Pentium Math bug INTEL has lost some of its market share. As for PCoperating systems IBM/Warp is still the most user friendly for running DOSand windows programs. As for Windows 95, Bill Gates held to his Promise and removed all support for your Previous DOS Operating system. In fact when youInstall the newest Beta the install program deletes all of your Dos Commandsand replaces them with Win95 commands. This is a Bold move by Microsoft because if they can get it to fly they would have a Monopoly on PC Computers.If you decide to use Windows 95 then you will need to Buy or use all Windowsprograms because the Dos support is worth shit anymore. Because of this therehas been a ton of BAD Press on Win95 forcing Microsoft to delay its releaseuntil Aug 1994. Microsoft did decide to release some 400,000 copies at $29.00each. This is just a bullshit smoke screen. Its there way of releasing theprogram for sale but still calling it a late Beta. That way the press cant beto hard on them. I personally hope the whole Product Dies!. But! Of course itwont. Bill Gates isn't the richest man in the world because he is stupid.Although after releasing a program like MICROSOFT BOB One would have to wonder about him.                          Bad boy!                                           The WarEZhouse BBS                                           (209) 772-9165                                           USR V-34 Everything 28.800                                           5 Gigs Hard drive                                           12 Gigs 100% Check software                                           Software available on                                           4MM/90M D.A.T. Tape                                           Qic-80 Tape                                           CD-Rom (Pinnacle Micro Recorder)