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I have an old game DVD (Chessmaster 9000) that I bought legit (I swear), and I would like to play it on my Mac Air, which has no optical drive. With another game (Civ V) I've had success data-dumping the DVD to an iso in linux, and then mounting the iso on the Mac Air. But Chessmaster 9000 is the kind of game that needs the disc in the drive to play. Having the iso mounted is not enough.

Is there a way to convince the Mac Air that it has a disk in a drive? My best hunch so far is that if it is possible, it involves a vndevice command, but I have had no luck so far, and documentation for it is very thin on the ground. I'm looking for the magic to make this work via a low-level command-line, rather than the commercial (but cheap) software that is available in one answer.

  • It looks like it requires writing your own low-level driver for the fake device. In other words, worth $10 to me! Accepting @Guido's answer.
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    If it is very old, it will be a PowerPC program which will not run on modern OS X versions.
    – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen
    Jun 23, 2013 at 22:07

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Try with DAEMON Tools Lite for Mac, you can download here:

http://www.daemon-tools.cc/products/dtMacLite

This software has figured out how to trick the computer to thinking a DVD is mounted and I don't know if you can re-implement it via the command line tool vndevice you mentioned.

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  • How does this tool differ from mounting .iso images directly via Finder?
    – nohillside ♦
    Jun 7, 2013 at 7:45
  • I used it to mount images that were unsupported by Finder, and maybe they use a different engine (or they simulate a dvd drive) to mount the file. I wrote try not sure will work
    – Guido Preite
    Jun 7, 2013 at 7:53
  • I had trouble working out the weird interface at first, but it turns out this works! Thanks @GuidoPreite. Now: what's the low-level magic going on here? I can't help think there's some simple CLI trick that doesn't require $10 activation ... but if not, that's a worthwhile $10 in my view.
    – Steve Petersen
    Jun 7, 2013 at 16:48
  • For the benefit of others who might try the light version: click the "change" button on the first splash screen to activate your trial period. (?!) Then a new "Remote" device shows up. The only way I found to mount anything on it, though, was to change the preferences of Daemon Tools to make a key combination for mounting a new image. (?!) From there, hit the key combo you chose, and you will be able to pick your iso.
    – Steve Petersen
    Jun 7, 2013 at 16:51
  • Glad you solved, I really don't know how they implemented
    – Guido Preite
    Jun 7, 2013 at 18:32

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