Thread: The Game is On with Game JackaL

IF YOU ARE a gamer, the most annoying part is having to look for and insert the CD / DVD before yOu can start a game. Besides being an inconvenience, doing so is also risky for your ga!pe discs - after playing for.'a few months, your favorite game's disc gets scratched (due to handling and drive vibration). Saying goodbye to the game is all that can be done then, since a scratched disc is unreadable.

Unleash your games and go gaming" disc free" in seconds: using Game Jackal. eliminates the need to insert the disc before playing your favorite game title, therefore allowing you to fire it up in seconds. It does this without modifying any of your game's files or installing any virtual drives on your system (thus not contributing to piracy). Simply select the game you want to play from the Game Jackal interface, or create a desktop shortcut for faster access.

Game Jackal has a task based interface with the main tasks arranged together on the left-side of the application window. The Tools section allows for managing profiles - creating, editing, and removing them. The major part of the screen is used for displaying all the game profiles created so far - a profile is the information captured by Game Jackal for a specific game. Creating a Game Jackal profile is easy using the profile wizard. Selecting the "create a profile" option from the Tools section will walk you through the process.



A profile can also be created in other ways. You could drag and drop the game's icon into the profile window, or right click the shortcut of an existing game on the desktop and click "convert to Game Jackal profile" for one-click profile creation. While creating a profile, you can either choose the name of your game if it is listed in the drop down menu, or if you know the protection mechanism it uses just choose that instead. Game Jackal will ask for the location of the game executable (EXE file), and then offer a choice of quick-launch and image-mode. Image mode adds support for games that need to stream data directly from the CD or DVD during game play.

Installation of this full product follows the standard Windows installer pattern, where clicking the "Next" button proceeds to the next step. Once installed, you are given a choice of three skins that change the color scheme of Game Jackal. The screen¬shot on this page shows the default skin in action.

You need to create a profile key" at first run, if it is a new installation, or import the old on.e if you already had a set of game profiles created earlier. A guided tutorial of how to use Game Jackal is also shown the first time, so that you can familiarize yourself with the application and how it works. By default, Game Jackal sets itself to start whenever you startup the PC, or login. You might want to disable that to reduce idle RAM usage if using a PC low on memory. This full product worth is for PC World readers.