Surely for most CD-ROM games of that era some sort of cached streaming would help greatly. For those that actually had large chunks of data not CDDA audio, i.e

Surely for most CD-ROM games of that era some sort of cached streaming would help greatly. For those that actually had large chunks of data not CDDA audio, i.e. those with FMVs on the CD, the speed of many Internet connections these days is greater than I got out of a local CD-ROM in the mid 90s especially when the latency of spin up time is considered. Streaming the data on request might feel faster than the local physical drive did back then, and avoids transferring the whole disk just to play the first part of the game. It might even make multi-CD games that started appeating in the mid 90, like Wing Commander III, practical to run this way. Of course you still need to implement some simulation of a disk swap. For many the game was relatively small with CD music tracks making up most of the CD - these could be compressed (MP3/similar) and transmitted that way to be unpacked in the emulator at the other side. Thsi would make the payload much smaller than a full CD so make the games more practical even without trying to stream them.