Originally posted by: duhh
Personally, I have never used gamedrive... Here's my understanding though.... It is a ripper and emulator for CD/DVD all in one.
Daemon Tools is probably the best CD/DVD emulator EVER. This thing has been around for years and they are very on top of updating. You can change the device name so it isnt blacklisted, and they add code in for blacklists very frequently. 100% free.
Now, Daemon will only do so much for you as it is actually only an emulator. You still need to copy the games to your computer. Any burning software will do this, but you need some fancy tools to get the ones with copy protection working right.
Alcohol Software makes a very good tool for you to try. It can image most games with copy protection intact. Other tools like clonecd, etc will do it. There arent that many freeware utils that I know of that read images with copy protection intact. The cool thing about Alcohol, ist that is also comes with an emulator (version 120%) so you can rip burn and mount all from one interface. I personally still use daemon for my image mounting/emulation.
Alcohol trial I think functions for 30 Days free (and the images are still good after the trial is over, they dont go bad). So grabit and image some stuff up. Even if you don't decide to buy it you still can have the images and daemon for free in a month