Those no-disc patches can be sketchy and infected, so watch out!
My preferred way to play games without CDs was virtual disc emulators, so you can store a copy of your game disc on your hard drive, and virtually pop that game's CD image into the virtual drive in when you want to play that specific game.
One good trick with these, is that you don't even need a full copy of the disc: There was some trick to creating a very small disc image that just has enough information to get past the game's copy protection, but it's been well over 2 decades since I did any of that, so you'll have to do your own research.