Decided to share this as I had some success with doing a sort-of-noCD hack for a few children's games from the 90s. This one's for American Girls Premiere, of which we have an ISO for it available. I know you can always get away with just mounting the ISO, but there are times that I don't feel like popping the disk in.
Make a DATA folder in your game's directory. This is where you'll stuff the assets for the game to run. They can be found on the data folders in disk 1 and disk 2.
Go to your AmGirls Premiere directory, and then edit cdlink.ini; change the drive letter to C:\ or whatever drive you stuffed the game on:
Fire up regedit. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\TLC\AmGirls2. Now edit the datapath entry, and change its value to the folder where you installed the game:
Last but not the least, copy the .ID files from Disk 1 and Disk 2, to the root of the drive you installed the game:
If you ended up with a stage after choosing a character, then congratulations!
Let me know if my method works, and I'll be trying out and posting some moar hax for a few other games.