I found a similar thread to this from last year, but I thought I would refine my question with a bit of a story.

I am a high school student in Australia, and one of my classes is Information Processes and Technologies... pretty much computer programming.

One of our units is to create a game as a class, as would a small computer games company would do. We all work on our own projects until we come up with a completed game. Ours is an RPG sort of idea, very, very simple as far as they go, but it allows LAN play. To complete the assessment we have to create a finished copy on a CD/DVD and it would have to play like any other major computer game, i.e. install from this CD and then run from an .exe.

There are 15 people in the class, so to test it out we want to install it and play a LAN game (fun lesson, right? ). It appears some idiot in the class has, however, mucked around with our few months work and we have only the original 1 working CD in the class, the first and only we created.

Now you can see the problem... 15 people (20 people can play LAN, and we want to test out that it can run that many) and 1 disc. And we really don't want to burn that many copies if it is faulty.

At home I have found the easiest thing to do is just mount the .iso in Daemon Tools (or similar) and it runs fine. However there is no way I'm having 15 geeks in my house with their computers, as the school doesn't allow that sort of program to be installed on the restricted access computers there.

So my question is, is there a portable program such as this that would enable us to just have copies of on our USB and be able to mount multiple copies of the .iso and run it off the school computers?

If so, I'm also thinking many, many hours playing games at school when we should be working

Any suggestions welcome, as a class we decided this was probably the best way to do it, unless you guys have a better idea.

Well, maybe someone will come up with a better solution but what about mounting iso images to virtual operating systems (e.g. with Virtualbox)?

If you are using XP you could try VCdControlTool.exe available free but unsupported from microsoft.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/ ... nel_21.exe

works with W2K3 Server too, I use it all the time on customers sites as a portable VCD app were i dont want to install somthing like deamon tools on to there server, when i need to run updates etc. Its really usefull as i keep all my CD's and DVD's as ISO's on the laptop and also many 1U Servers dont even have an optical drive installed anyway. It has just 1 dependant file vcdrom.sys but that can stay on your portable device in the same directory as the exe file.
and as a bonus it all wieghs in at about 30KB total size.

The install instructions tell you to copy the vcd.sys driver to your %systemroot%\system32\drivers folder. but this is not necicary as the vcd controll panel allows you to specify the location of the driver from the driver controll button.

In your situation you will need to have your teacher's and school's ICT manager's agreement before downloading and using this software. It is free and from recolection there is no specific EULA so given the circumstances it should be OK with them.

I work as an ICT consultant to many educational institutions in the UK and it is standard practice in the UK to provide students on such courses were software development is being taught with a sandbox environment (controlled access to a vmware machine through the students profile or a simaler type of setup).
Presumably your not in a sandbox so it is likely your schools network manager will need to exclude the exe and sys file from the networks policy restrictions for it to run from anywere, again you will need to discuss that with the network manager .

Not quite sure what Virtualbox is I'm afraid. I'm not completely up to date with everything, still bit of a noob with quite a few things.

At this school the restrictions aren't that 'restrictive'. As long as it's on a portable device, pretty much anything can be run off of it, as long as it doesn't attempt to install anything on the computer itself. We've managed similar sorts of things before and no fuss was raised about it, but still the IT guy will be fine with everything. Seriously restrictions aren't that much at all. Kids find ways around things and install large games such as Halo onto the local hard drives and play them, much to the teacher's knowledge. Australian schools in small towns are very relaxed when it comes to what is 'right' and 'wrong' , but anyway tangent there.

So this program can be installed and run entirely off of a portable device (in my case a portable hard drive, in others on thumb drives) with not too much fussing around beforehand to get it to do so?

Thanks for the replies.