This can be beneficial also for other reasons. Your cd-rom drive might be to slow for the game to run smoothly. Your computer may not always have a cd-rom drive connected to it (laptop). The cd-rom may sometimes produce read errors.
My first emulator was FakeCD. It doesn't need MSCDEX which may be important if free conventional memory is a problem. However, it doesn't work with many 'new' games (released 1995 or later). I don't plan to work any further on FakeCD and it is mentioned here only because of its conventional memory advantage.
My second (and current) emulator is FakeDr. It needs MSCDEX and is able to work with almost all games. The hard disk with the cd-rom contents can be local or remote (in a network).
Download FakeCD 1.0c (06/18/96) 14KB
FakeCD documentation (06/18/96)
Download FakeDr 0.9 v13 (11/28/96) 23KB
FakeDr documentation (11/28/96)
Download Empty-CD (11/28/96) 1KB
Empty-CD is a device driver that emulates an always empty cd-rom drive. This driver is necessary
on a computer with no cd-rom drive to get MSCDEX loaded.
Ingo Warnke / 20.6.96