Play with No Disc, on a laptop with no CD rom

[Caine]

Hey Folks, I'm kinda in a conundrum here about what to do about this, I currently have the old FF8 PC from back in the day when Square Enix was square Soft. I have followed the tutorials and methods suggested, but for some reason I can only get it to work if I have a CD rom attached to the laptop. I did make the ISO images on the laptop and created folders for them.

Any suggestions on what I can do to get this to work without the need of a CD rom and playing without the discs? the Laptop itself is a ASUS model G46V running windows 8.

Looking around the forums I have seen multiple things people have done but nothing that seems to be helping, any friendly suggestions?

[mystery_editor]

Have you tried mounting the ISO's using a virtual drive manager? (ie. Daemon Tools, PowerISO, etc.)
Apparantly, you may also need to edit the registry to ensure that the game points to the correct virtual drive (Taken from this post on Eyes on FF forums):

Open the Start Menu, click 'Run...', type in regedit and click 'OK'.
 
Navigate to:

Code: [Select]

My Computer > HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Square Soft, Inc > FINAL FANTASY VIII > 1.00 Once the 1.00 'folder' is open, you should see the key called 'DataDrive' (it's the 3rd one from the top for me).  Right-click 'DataDrive' and then 'Modify' (NOT 'Modify Binary Data').  Change the Value Data to the drive letter that Daemon Tools generates when it's emulating a drive (F: in my case).
 
Click OK and close the Registry Editor.
 
Now, run Daemon Tools and have it emulate a drive.  Go into My Computer if you want to make sure you set DataDrive to the correct drive letter.  Mount the ISO image that you put into the FF8_DISC1 folder, and play the game!

Unfortunately, I don't have a PC version of FF8 to confirm this, but it sounds consistant with copy protection methods of the era.

[Caine]

I'll give it a go and see what happens but yeah, I did download DaemonTools and make the mirrors, but the virtual drive I'm a little unclear on how to make