A friend of mine and I are planning on opening a PC gaming center. To prevent theft of the cd's, none of the computers are going to have cd-roms installed, but most games nowadays require the cd to be in the cd-rom in order to play. No-cd patches are, of course, not an option. What we would like to do is to be able to install the games from over the network, and have each computer check the server's cd-roms for their cd. Does anyone know how to do this?

You can share a CDROM from one PC to others. That's not a problem. Your problem is going to be the amount of machines needed to make it work. I don't know how many CDROMs you can put in one of your so called 'servers' without losing speed. How many gaming machines do you plan to have as a start? Let's say you started w/ 5 'servers' w/ 2 CDROMs each. That would give you 10 gaming machines. For that your place would have to have network jacks wired to a punch block and a 16 or 24 port switch connected to each one of the connectors that are in use on the punch block. One port on the switch would be connected to a router. That gives you your networking. To keep it simple, you would share the 2 CDROMs in server 1 to the first 2 gaming machines and so on. I would use static IPs. Test all that with just one or two machines before you invest any money to make sure it works. Right click on a CDROM and share it. Then go to another PC on the network and click start, run. type \\IP_address of the first machine and open the CDROM. See if the game starts.

Thanks for the reply! Unfortunately, we've already tried that, and the games still ask for the CD. Is there a way to share a cd-rom in such a way so that the gaming computers believe them to be local? At one gaming center I visited, after the employee inserted a game cd into the server, all their gaming computers (about 15) acted as if the cd was inserted locally (autoplay kicked in) and it allowed them to play. That's what we'd like to set up. Any ideas?

Attach (map) the network shared drives as local.

Yes, as stated above you need to not only share out the root of the CD/DVD drive, but you must map it as a drive letter on the client machines. Also, you do not need a different drive for every client machine - just one drive for each game you will support. And you can pretty much put as many optical drives in a machine that you want. Assuming the server uses a SATA hard drive, you should have 2 IDE channels for a total of 4 possible optical drives. You could then add IDE cards to add as many more as you need. Of course, the real problem would be running out of drive bays. The CM-Stacker case has bays for up to 11 5-1/4 bays. Another option which would not require any drives on the server would be to use a program to mount images of the CD/DVDs. It may work with some and not with others though. Michael J

Mapping the share allowed me to install the game, but it still asks for the cd. Only one of our games seemed to work by mounting a copy of the game into Daemon Tools. Any other ideas? I really appreciate the help you guys have been giving!

Go back to the place where you saw it work and ask them how they did it.