How to run Scrabble 2003 on a Windows 10 machine with no CD ROMdrive

I’ve been enjoying Scrabble 2003 since around, well, 2003, but have had to keep a vintage Windows XP laptop with CD drive to play it on.

Having finally worked out how to run it directly on a Windows 10 64 bit machine with no CD drive I thought I’d share how.

A) Create an .iso copy of your original CD

First you’ll need to make a .iso file copy of the Scrabble CD ROM.

To do this I used “BurnAware Free” which works well and is easy to use and, as its name implies, is free (for personal use), though it does come bundled with various bits of software that you can easily decline to install.

You can download it from here:

http://www.burnaware.com/download.html

After you’ve installed BurnAware, run it and select “Copy to ISO”

(1) Put your Scrabble 2003 CD into the CD ROM reader and select it
(2) Select the file location and name you wish to save the .iso file as on your local hard drive
(3) Click “Copy”

The .iso file was created in around 3’30” on my machine:

Check that the file has created successfully in the chosen location:

B) Move the .iso to the Windows 10 machine, and configure it to run under Windows 10

Copy the file to the Windows 10 machine you want to run it on, here I’ve copied it to the file as
“C:\q scrabble\scrabble2003.iso”.

The program won’t run directly under Windows 10, first you need to ‘mount’ the drive.
To do this right click the .iso file and select ‘mount’:

Windows 10 will mount the .iso image as a virtual drive, in this case as DVD drive F: (1)

The program will not run immediately but needs to run in a Windows ‘compatibility mode’.
To do this right click ‘setup.exe’ (2).

Then select ‘Troubleshoot Compatibly’ (3)

Windows will come back with the following screen:

Select ‘Try recommended settings’ and Scrabble will now run on your Windows 10 machine, directly from its harddrive.

In Windows 10 I get a pop-up warning me about screen resolution, but it seems to cause no problems.

Enjoy!

If you do find and read this page I’d be interested to hear, why not drop me an email to:

joe DOT scrabble AT tozer DOT org DOT uk

Page created 29 August 2018