Ok, I am suck. it DOES work... you just have to follow the instructions that aren't included
I'm going to leave this here for others and to show my apparent incompetance
Without trying to start any contraversy (I read the other threads from atrius about this) but I have Sacred Gold and while I can play the game fine with the CD it is true that the Sacred Underworld no-cd fix does not work with this version of the game. The game version for Sacred Gold is 2.0.14 and appears to be different enough from Sacred Underground to cause many problems when you try and use that fix.
The game does bypass the CD check but all textures and models are displayed incorrectly. When I load the original exe the game is perfect, except for the annoyance of having to dig up the disc from the bottom of some pile in my room.
Hopefully someone will take a look at this and make an updated no-cd fix as I don't believe it would take too long or be too difficult due to how close the old fix is to working on this version. Of course since I am not skilled enough to do this myself I could be completely wrong about the work.