Robbo007, you have summoned me! Hardware emulation, particularly optical drive
emulation, is far too commonly misunderstood.
I don't hold anything against you personally, but it's one of my pet
peeves that all across the Internet, people think that simply mounting an ISO =
hardware emulation.
If you're in Mac OS X or Linux, and you "mount" an iso, all you
are doing is having the files in that image displayed in a folder somewhere. You
don't magically make hardware appear. The "sudo mount -o loop [path to
iso] [path to folder you want to mount it in]" command that you can do from
terminal in either Linux or Mac OS X also simply displays the files in the ISO
file in the folder you specify.
I also want to point out that PowerISO _does_not_ emulate an optical drive and
AcetoneISO _does_not_ emulate an optical drive. They just make the files of an
ISO show up in a directory.
WINE sees that the path you associated with a drive letter is not where a CD is
mounted. And no, specifying that it is a CD won't magically give it a
hardware name, obey the SCSI command set, have a firmware revision, look like it
is plugged into a controller, and everything else that real optical drives do.
It needs to look like a CD drive, i.e., hardware.
The heart of the operating system, the kernel, is what sees hardware. All
programs ran by the kernel, including WINE, only know about hardware because the
kernel tells them about it. All hardware info is passed onto a program by the
kernel.
The kernel can lie and say that there is hardware present that is not. This is
one method of emulating hardware. To do so in an ideal fashion, you'd write
a whole kernel (operating system) specifically for the purpose of hardware
emulation where the kernel itself can do hardware emulation (lying).
But that isn't really an option for most people. Fortunately, the Mac OS X
and Linux kernels are modular, meaning they have a way of extending kernel
functionality by loading some kind of kernel module. Once a kernel module is
loaded, it is pretty much a part of that kernel.
CDEmu is a CD emulator for Linux and has a kernel module that inserts into the
Linux kernel, giving the Linux kernel the functionality of lying about extra
optical drives being present.
Kernel modules for Linux are called "kernel modules". Kernel modules
for Mac OS X are called "kernel extensions" abbreviated as
"kexts".
Windows can run a driver in kernel mode. Daemon Tools and Virtual CloneDrive
install such a driver into Windows that lies (from the kernel level) and says
there is extra hardware present.
You cannot install a driver into WINE, so Daemon Tools and Virtual CloneDrive or
any other Windows kernel-level hardware emulator _will_not_ work in WINE.
Unfortunately, after hours of Googleing, there is yet to be an open source or
even free (as in "free beer") optical drive emulator for Mac OS X.
There are some for sale, but no freebies. I know that they must work by
inserting a kext.
It is possible for someone to make an open source optical drive emulator for Mac
OS X via use of a kext, but no one has taken up the task yet.
So your only practical and free option is to dual boot your Mac with Linux
(preferably Ubuntu or a variant thereof) and install CDemu and WINE.
Do not attempt to compile CDEmu from source. It's actually impossible. The
compiled binaries just appeared on someone's hard drive one day, and that
person uploaded them.
Just mount the optical image with CDEmu, find where it is mounted to, go to the
drives tab in winecfg, and associate a drive letter with where the emulated
optical drive is mounted. WINE sees that the path you associated with a drive
letter is indeed where a CD is mounted.
I actually wrote a big thing about this to have on stand-by:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20170669/Hardware%20Emulation%20Ignorence%20Eradifier.rtf.
If you want the full scoop, go there.
Cheers,
Jake