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This is called "prejudice". In most circles it's considered a negative thing.

I find it ironic that many people automatically consider prejudice to be a bad thing. Not that it isn't, but either way it is still a great irony.

However, GP has shown that his decision - whether right or wrong - is based on observance and careful consideration, not prejudice.

Why? You clearly have access to the Internet.

So? He can has access to a computer which has access to Slashdot. Is that sufficient to for him to play Steam games on his own computer? I can tell something about you. You posess the rare fortune of having adequate Internet access from the very same computer that you intend to use to play your games. Because others in your personal circle have the same privilege you presume that it is universal and that anybody who has experiencing severe inconvenience from DRM is simply being unreasonable. I apologise for getting personal, but you need a serious wakeup call.

Product activation is completely invisible and automatic. As for DRM, well, I realise some people hate it on religious grounds, but it's really not that bad.

DRM is a severe compromise. Some people are inconvenienced by it, others less so. Some of those who are inconvenienced are willing to deal with it, others aren't. Some are concerned with legitimate eventualities, while others don't mind the risk. Some were ok with it in principle, but got badly burnt by some aspect of service.

Steam, in particular, is a huge hassle for a lot of people in the world. It's obviously not a hassle for you or many of their regular customers, but it is for me and most people that I know. I bought 1 Steam game last year (Portal) and I so far the only way I have found to play it so far is by using a no-Steam cracked version.

I would be grateful if you refrain from using the word "religious" as a derogitory term whenever you feel like ignoring other people's arguments.

Sure, one day in the hypothetical future Valve's servers could disappear, leaving you unable to play your games any more. This is no different from non-DRM-encumbered games you own on physical media, which could stop working at any time due to loss of or damage to the CDs.

Denying yourself jam today and tomorrow because of the hypothetical possibility that you might only be able to get it today is just silly.

Scroll up to the top of this page. See the article about a major digital distrobution service being shut down? It is not some vague hypothetical worry - it happenned. I have bought 48 games from GOG, including 3 from the day before their site went down. If they were DRM-encumbered then I would have lost everything, but because they are DRM-free I have backups on my hard drive. If my hard drive should fail then I can get my games from my external drive. Should both somehow fail at the same time (or be simultaneously stolen from seperate locations) I would still be able to salvage copies from friends of mine who bought the same games.

If it turns out that GOG is really gone, and this is not a publicity stunt, then all that means to me is that I won't be able to buy more games from them in future.

By the way, I legally bought Alcohol 120%, which means not only do I have backups of my physical CD and DVD games, but I don't even need to be hassled with having to put discs in the drive when I want to play.

(Personally, I've actually bought copies on Steam of older games I also own on physical media. It's only a few bucks, and the convenience of being able to install the game at the click of a button -- instead of having to dig around for the disk and then hope it still works -- is well worth the money. Strange, really: this suppsoedly evil DRM platform means I can play games I own more easily than the DRM-free versions!)

That is an advan

The computers are drinking beer now? We're certainly doomed.

Computers wouldn't touch beer (which can't even reach 50% yet) when they already have Alcohol 120%.

No, but this will. There's also a free version called Alcohol 52%.

Thanks for the clarification - for a moment I was worried my ethanol-powered PC would test positive. Maybe I should uninstall Alcohol 52 and 120 to be on the safe side.

F* you microsoft for destroying my liver, since alcohol seems to be the only proper way to deal with your shit on daily basis.

Indeed! How do they get away with making an operating system that can't mount images in this day and age?

I take this a step farther, and have done so for nearly a decade. The very first thing I do when I get a game is to rip a disk image and save it to my file server. I use Alcohol to rip and mount the images because it preserves or emulates all the copy-protection garbage. Then I put the CD back in the box and put it on the shelf, never to be touched again.

I started this when my kids were little and I was getting tired of them ruining their game disks. It was so convenient I started doing it for all my disks. These days hard drive space is cheap so there's very little reason not to keep the whole disk image around.

In the very rare cases when Alcohol can't manage a working image, I go to Game Copy World and download the no-CD crack. I don't like doing that, though, simply because it makes it hard to apply official game patches. When the game is patched, you have to get the newest version of the crack and re-apply it. (And to the grandparent... I've personally never had a virus/malware problem with anything I've found on Game Copy World.)

Disk copy protection doesn't work. It's never worked; there have always been cracks for games all the way back to the days of the Apple ][. People who want to play games without paying for them will find a way to do so within days of the game's release. After that, all copy protection does is piss off your legitimate customers. But after more than 20 years of dealing with this crap, I've given up all hope that publishers will ever get a clue.

http://www.alcohol-soft.com/
(And I'm sure there are Free solutions out there that do the same thing, I just prefer this setup as it's what I'm used too)

1) install Alcohol 120
2) create a 'fake' "cd-rom"
3) "Rip" Reader Rabbit to an ISO on sons Hard Drive
4) "Mount/Insert" the "ISO/CD" on your new "CD-Rom". Set A120 to Auto-Remount (reloads "CD" on computer reboot)
5) Put Reader Rabbit CD back in its safe case, never to be touched again.
6) repeat process for any other program that 'requires' CD.
7) ...
8) PROFIT!!!

Alcohol 120%

StarForce, at least in my experience, is one of the most prevasive and effective way to prevent copy of games- and I have encountered more protections than most people.

They certainly prevent you from backing up your games that's for sure.

Currently I have four legitmate games that are protected by different version (3.x) of StarForce. Let me tell you, they are a major PAIN in the ass to backup. One of them works with Alcohol 120% SF copy scheme + DaemonTools 4.0, two of them (newer) work only when you make images of them using Lite-On dvd drives + seperate IDE controller card, and the latest one refuses to even run no matter what I do. Now I have to carry that game around if I want to play it on my laptop.

As to compability 16bit mode, I can also testify that this is true. The drive just gets slower and slower and eventually, your system become unresponsive. This last about 4 minutes. Either you wait it out, eject the disc, or restart the computer. Thankfully it usually only happens with copied games and scratched discs.

Ways to "defeat" StarForce without hexing the driver- 1. Use Lite-On brand DVD driver to creates the game image. For some unknown reason Lite-On drives have some extra functions in its firmware that enable the drive to copy SF games correctly. (a/ My Samsung/Sony/Pioneer drives never worked b/ I think SF fixed this in the latest version)
2. When you run a SF game, the check program first check to see if you have cd-rom drives connected to your onboard IDE channels. If it does then the program wont let you run the game from SCSI cd-rom drive(All image program ep. daemontool, alcohol uses SCSI instead of IDE).
a. You can use IDE jammers. But beware, they can screw your system up and you may have to restart. Also they do not work with the newer version of SF as the SF driver interfaces directly with the drive/chipset (bypassing the BIOS. That's pretty low and way out of standard practice).
b. You can try to disconnect the CD-rom before you try to play your copied games. If the check program doesn't see a IDE cd-rom, it allows the use of SCSI cd-rom.
c. If all else failed, you can get a cheapo $20 IDE controller card and connect all your cd-rom drive into it. IDE controller card uses emulated SCSI.
This brings us to a very interesting question- what would happen to all those people who have SATA and IDE drives? Some implementation of SATA (Via?) uses emulated SCSI. If the user had another drive connected to a IDE drive, the SATA drive would not work.

Finally, I just have to let this out- StarForce you suck! You "made" my backing up work much more challanging. I hope you burn in hell.

I also have had my share of problems with Copy Protection on games I legally own.

The answer for me was Alcohol 120%. It lets you run games completely from your hard drive. I never met a copy protect scheme it couldn't get around. I run all my games from it now.

Why not use http://www.alcohol-soft.com/ (or similar) and create an exact duplicate of the CD? Unless you're making one big wav file you may run into issues with cutting contiguous tracks (think crossfade with a track sep) that have silences removed for long-play albums (or is music so bad these days everyone only aggregates singles into an album?)

You paying customers are getting screwed by the companies themselves. Even before it was as "rampant" as it is claimed to be today, they were building in copy-protection techniques, which made it harder for the paying customer to use their media their way. This is even truer now, with cds like "Break the Cycle" (classic example cd) unable to work on many players.

I highly reccomend a read of The hard-to-find truth about piracy, which includes excellent parts such as:

The leisure corporations are conducting, in fact, a war not against pirates, but on their own customers. For many years now, honest consumers paying full price for legitimate products have been saddled with crippled, inferior versions of what the pirate users get for free:

- Pirate users don't have to keep their precious PC game discs spinning endlessly and noisily in the drive (and being subjected to repeated handling) while they play the game.

- Pirate users don't have to sit through all those infuriatingly long, unskippable splash screens / trailers / adverts before they can watch the actual movie on their new DVD, while the poor saps who paid for it in a shop do.

- Pirate users don't get their brand-new music CD home only to find that it won't play in their computer because it's been made in a non-standard-compliant "anti-piracy" format which prevents legitimate users from legally listening to music they've paid for.

- Pirate users can use their game consoles to play games originating from any country, while legitimate purchasers of, say, a game from Japan will be unable to play it on their legitimate, but UK-bought, Playstation 2.

- Pirate users don't have to uninstall perfectly legal software applications from their PCs, or put up with the secret installation of damaging programs if they want to play their new games, unlike the unfortunate legitimate consumers.

And so on. But astoundingly, the entertainment business still doesn't think it's made life miserable enough for its honest, paying customers.

Found that nice link in NTK for Sept. 9, 2003. I'd say that as a customer, you're getting screwed over. I'm not saying don't buy what you want, please do, but I'm saying it should also be ok for you to download a "Pirated" version so that you get to use the media your way instead of theirs. No-CD Cracks should be fine, but companies are now making your $50 product useless for using them. Sad, I think.

Battlefield is SafeDisc protected. Use CloneCD to create an image. Use a good reading drive with fast error skipping. Then mount that image in Daemon Tools. Daemon Tools works for all except the very latest copy protections. Mostly, the updated copy protections include a blacklist which usually gets overriden in the next D-Tools release.

If a game is SecuROM-protected, you have to use another approach, mainly using a different reading program that supports DPM.

Really, handling physical media like CD/DVD is so 2000. Today you stuff enough HD space into your file server and keep CD images to mount when needed.

Alcohol

Basically it's a CD/DVD drive emulator along the lines of Daemon Tools. You rip your game CD to an image format - Alcohol supports iso, bin&cue, clone cd images, and many more. Then you can "mount" the CD in a virutal drive, and the game thinks its in a physical drive, when really it's just being read off of your hard drive.

Most of my games that require the CD to be in the drive think that it is with Alcohol running. It even has settings for copying PlayStation 2 DVDs (although you'll still need a mod chip to run them).

It'll also burn CDs from images.

Already is http://shop.alcohol-soft.com/campain.php?campain=s lashdot&forwardpage=http://forum.alcohol-soft.com/ index.php?showtopic=13836&hl=starforce

I also agree with what your saying. The real problem lies in not the game developers, but the publishers.

The developers, while money is always welcome, mostly just want to see their game played. And, if there really nice, their game modified and kept 'current' so it can 'live' forever. The whole Quake->HL->CS Mod thing.

Its the publishers that want the game to make the most money. And rightly so: they've put a lot of money into advertising and keeping those developers happy with their coding, just to get the game out.

So its really two different angles out there. You got the developers who just want their game to be played--much like a kindergarten teacher, who just wants to see their students grow up and become famous... and the Publisher, who wants to make as much money as (in)humanly possible from the game--much like a overbearing parent, forcing their children to do insane things to become famous and bring home money for them.

AFAIK, the game developers don't want to have any more hassle than they need to, when programming the game. Anyone remember the "KISS" rule? Keep It Simple Stupid? That's what most programmers _live_ by... as simple code is easy to debug code. Which we all know is really the best kind of code.

The only time I've ever used a actual game CD is when I'm installing them. And even then, most of the time I don't. I just make an image of them in Alcohol120%, and mount them using DaemonTools so I can install them from my HD.

The basic procedure is put in the Retail CD, and open Alcohol. Copy the game based on its copy protection scheme (easy enough to google to find) and select the settings for the most exact backup for your CD-ROM. Save the MDS and Image file for all the discs (takes about 45 minutes for a 4 disc set, if you've got a decent computer, and a good CD-ROM) and then mount the first disc in DaemonTools, and install as normal. 90% of the time, I don't even need to find the NOCD crack, as the copy protection is 'emulated' in DaemonTools, and therefore the game runs as coded.

I'm not condoning piracy. What I am condoning is having a backup of all your games on your HD so that you can play them without having the discs on you (good for you laptop-gamers--battery life is extended, because there's no CD to spin) and so that you have a backup in the case of catastrophic damage to them (such as little children, tornados, or Gridbugs) and so that you can keep your game in its box, in mint condition, forever.

Some would argue that what I'm doing is illegal. I'm 'modifying' the game in someway... I look at it like this: I've paid my 54-dollars-and-ninty-four-cents for my game--I can play it any damn way I please.

Later.

P.s. Half-Life2 is going to rock the cashbah!

I used a combination of USB 2.0 and Firewire external drives. Maxtor 250Gb were around $230.00 retail (CompUSA purchase); Maxtor 200Gb were around $190.00 retail. The last few I put together were Belkin external USB 2.0 conversion cases with 160Gb drives I had taken from a failed RAID array.

I've got ten drives right now, performance is phenomenal, and I no longer have to worry about my son destroying the CDs or DVDs he plays with. Using Daemon Tools and Alcohol 120% I'm able to emulate the common CD protections and mount images; using scripts I can simplify the task for my son.

I have one drive dedicated as my Vault storage. It's where I keep local repositories of open source code that interests me.

The biggest problem I've run into is merging the drives seamlessly under Windows. Under Linux it's no problem. Symbolic links massed in one central directory takes care of the problem; you can schedule the script to run using cron and create the links so it is always up to date.

Under Windows it is a bit more of a pain in the ass since shortcuts aren't "true" files. A nifty piece of software I found called Winbolic Link lets me make links that behave more like symbolic links do. The only downside is I've yet to find a way to script Winbolic Link but I'm probably going to switch my fileserver over to Linux soon *anyway*.

For what it's worth I have over twenty years of games, both CD and floppy (I have Might & Magic on bootable 5.25", if you can find the drive). "Finding" a game is a disaster for me. Thankfully imaging does exist, and I can still play the original Pool of Radiance when I want.