question about pc's

[Thesicness_inside_you]

right pcs require you to install a game yes!, then you need the disk to run the game yes! (unless you have a no-cd crack) so if you need the cd anyway whats the point in the installation could you not just run the game off the disk like consoles do?

its something that has confused the hell outa me for a long time, why cant you just put a sort of console cd drive in a pc so you can just "put cd in and play" no installation, just play.

i think that would be alot better than what you have to do now

you can still change settings etc like you would normally, only maybe loading would be a little longer.

i heard installation is so all the compressed data on a disk can be used, and so games can be longer than console games? (is this true) but if this is true why can console games just kinda stream the data off the disk and pc cant, and as for the "games are longer" i personally dont think they are (with the ecception of rpg's but there long anyway)

[interman]

hehe, well there are several reasons.
- the content is usually compressed.
- games are often several cds, so you wouldn't want to swap cds as soon as a shooter requires certain textures or whatever
- the games usually need to install data into the registry
- the cd/dvd access time is so high that the performance would be awful

and probably even more

[Jdub22]

When you buy a PC game, generally the game itself is compressed (like a .zip file) and so it's not playable in that form. That is a good thing in most cases because the more compressed the game is, the more data can be fit onto a single CD and less CD's are needed to store the game.
Anyways that's not a very good reason why PC games are better installed than run from directly off a CD. Ever notice the horrible load times that consoles tend to have? Well, that is because it's reading all the data off the CD during that load time. When you install a game on your hard drive, all the data is right there and hard drives can read/access data MUCH faster than consoles can read a CD. Also 99% of games that require CD's to play only require the CD's for the initial loading of the game, once in the game, the CD can usually be removed with no problems.
See, the only reason games require a CD when you try to play, is because it's even easier to pirate games that don't have CD checks than games that do check for the CD when you play.
So the "no-CD" cracks serve no purpose other than change the part of data that checks for the CD and it somehow either tricks the checker into thinking the CD is in the drive, or just skips the checking of the CD.

anyways i may be inaccurate in some of this but i'm pretty sure it's all true and i'm no hacker so i can't tell you much of how a no-cd crack works, though i'm familiar with how to apply them and where to find them.

hope that helped.