> That is because, duh, my computer doesn’t have a CD-ROM drive. But you can use a small DLL (cdemu.dll) to emulate one with some fake audio data and actually get it to play audio

This makes me curious to know if CDPLAYER.EXE would still work (unmodified, without extra DLLs) with a real CD-ROM drive if you ran it on a Windows 11 machine with one installed.

I can't say for certain but recently having done some work on windows with CDROM drives, i strongly suspect it would. I bet you could mount a music CD BIN/CUE with ImgDrive and it would work... Shit i guess i have to go try it don't I

Edit: i meant ImgDrive as a suggestion for those without optical drives. I have several, I'll test em out