Windows XP games not reading game play disc after CD has installed

[Renrick]

I have a Windows XP VM running on Windows 10.
Everything is setup and working well - including reading discs.
Trying to play old XP disc games. Managed to install the games as it read the discs.
When I click on the disc in My computer (has the name of the game so recongises it is in the CD tray), it runs the game overlay and then when I click on 'play', it says "please insert play disc".
I definitely have the correct disc in and it defintely can read it because it was also used to install the game. This happens on the few games I have tried.

I tried making an ISO of the game disc. Still does the same.

I read somewhere that it might be piracy protection so rip it with CD clone. I did this but I got a .CCD file which I don't know how to run.

[Renrick]

Capture.jpg (118.35 KiB) Viewed 3413 times

[mpack]

Please provide a VM log file. Make sure the VM is fully shut down, then right click it in the manager UI. Select "Show Log" and save "VBox.log" (no other file) to a zip file. Attach the zip here.

Note that the manager logs you previously provided are not useful for discussing problems with a VM.

Or, as a wild guess, make sure you have passthrough enabled on the CD controller in the VM. That will allow the VM to see the physical bad sectors that are usually the basis of physical media copy protection schemes.

[Renrick]

Apologies for wrong log file.
As you can see, plug through is enabled.
If this is relevant at all - The piracy protection was done by a key which was in the box. The installation process accepted the key.

[mpack]

It looks like you added multiple CD/DVD drives to the VM recipe. Please trim that down to one. This is usually a sign that someone is using the "Add a new drive" interface to insert a CD. Obviously those are not the same thing.

On a separate issue, 16MB is not a lot of graphics RAM. I would increase this to 64MB.

If this is relevant at all - The piracy protection was done by a key which was in the box. The installation process accepted the key.

Are you referring to a CD key? I.e. a number typed on the keyboard taken from a label on the box? If so then that identifies the buyer, but is quite separate from any copy protection mechanism that exists to protect physical media. After all the CD key is easily shared.

Returning to the subject of copy protection: the idea of passthrough it to give the VM access to the physical media so the game's copy protection check can see the protected sectors. The only problem there is that you haven't provided physical media, you are using an ISO. If the game is copy protected (and it is) then you need to use the original physical media. An ISO is a copy of the CD, so by definition will fall foul of copy protection.

[Renrick]

I tried using the original discs first but then read another post saying that you should make an iso with clone CD to bypass copy protection.
So I'm booting off disc now like you suggested and also made the changes you recommended. I'm now getting this error:

exception violation.PNG (31.85 KiB) Viewed 3207 times

When I click on debug break, I get this message:

runtime error.PNG (11.73 KiB) Viewed 3207 times

ON another game, it tries loading for ages and then gives me this error:

problem.PNG (16.05 KiB) Viewed 3207 times

[Renrick]

Log file enclosed

Win XP with games-2022-08-30-09-00-29.zip

(25.52 KiB) Downloaded 10 times

[mpack]

I tried using the original discs first but then read another post saying that you should make an iso with clone CD to bypass copy protection.

You must be conflating multiple discussions. It is true that having an ISO is always a much nicer experience than using physical media. But that obviously isn't possible if the software insists on having the physical media be present. And we would certainly never allow a discussion of how to defeat any copy protection mechanism, so that was not what any discussion you saw on this site was about.

I'm afraid I can't tell you anything about that runtime error. That's a support question for the relevant software itself.