I dont know anything bout ps emus and games explai

[Emuman]

is there a way to actually play the game without the cd?

[Angel316]

Yes trough image files. Daemon Tools is a CD emulator that might come in handy, and ePSXe can emulated images files by itself. There's different types of image files the most popular seems to be *.iso but theres also *.bin, *.img.. etc..

[brightman]

The image files are dumped by different programs like CDRWin, BlindRead, WinISO, CloneCD, etc. They each use a different extension so that's why there are so many variations. ePSXe can read most of those formats.

[The Player of Doom]

But it takes up SPACE, remember! One CD is around 650-700 mb. I prefer to play through CD.

[brightman]

It doesn't really matter with the 100 GB HDs of today. Plus playing off the HD is much much much faster and data load time is shorter.

[AdemoS]

Or you can use my favorite ripper Iso Buster. (isobuster.com) It is free and easy to figure out I recomend it.

-AdemoS