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My pants have legitimate uses that do not infringe on your pants patent(s) and so I have every right to sell them. I could even counter sue you in that your pants *could* be used in the ("dual boot"!) manner patented by myself. My justification here would include your earlier comment: "It's not how the customer finally uses it. It's how it is "intended" to be used. And how it's intended is up to the one holding the patent." Lawyers win again.

(damn, this is getting wierd)

There are a few programs that do just this already.

Alcohol 120
Blindwrite
CloneCD

They all do pretty decent jobs making 1:1 backup copies of software. Granted, there are some copy protection schemes they have trouble with (I believe Alcohol 120 had problems with Safecast2 for awhile. Not sure if they've fixed it yet), but all of them are being actively developed and reasonably priced if you're looking for that sort of thing.

Daemon Tools is a Virtual CD-ROM that works wonderfully with copy-protected discs. My personal experience is that getting a game to run with an ISO + Daemon is much easier then making a perfect copy of the disc.

Also, if you need a good image creation software I recommend Blindwrite.

[]s Badaro

http://www.blindwrite.com

The short answer is: yes you can.

I've got a six year old boy at home, he's not terribly gentle with CD's yet (he is learning tho). I use a program called bindwrite to make perfect 1:1 copies of the games that I legally purchase. I then place the original up in the closet. I've made working copies of Diablo II, Dungeon Siege and NWN with this program. I've used the copy of Diablo II to connect to battle.net with no problems. You just need a CDRW drive capable of writing sub-channel data, I've been using a plextor 40/12/40 drive.

Reader Rabbit's Toddler is not too bad (unfortunately our cd had been kidified, so my 22-month-old comes in regularly, tugging on my finger to get tech support when it tried to read a scrated area of the disk and crashes).

I'll second the vote for Reader Rabbit's Toddler. My kid loved it when he was that age. Also the Disney Interactive Storybooks (especially the Pooh titles) are enjoyable. Beware the newer ones, though, which are based on Shockwave rather than Quicktime. You cannot abort the long explanatory animations in the Shockwave titles. You can in the older Quicktime titles (like "Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree.")

Stay as far away as you can from Teletubbies! I have nothing against the show, really, but the game stinks to high heaven. It too suffers from frequent, long, uninterruptable animation sequences. It uses a clickless (point-and-hover) interface, but provides only a very subtle cue when you've hovered long enough to activate something. And, of course, the activation starts a long non-interactive sequence... Oh, and to exit the game you let the mouse hover in one of the screen corners. The game then exits without confirmation (through a 2-minute long non-interruptable credit sequence!). Now, where do you think a toddler's uncoordinated mouse twitches end up most of the time? You guessed it! The game is just plain frustrating to kids and parents alike.

BTW, I found a solution for the "kidified" CD syndrome. I no longer let my kids have the actual CD media. Instead, I've installed Daemon Tools virtual CD drive software. Before I install a game on the kids' machine I snag an image of it and mount that in the virtual drive. Once the game's installed I replace the desktop icon with a batch file that automagically mounts the appropriate CD image and starts the game. No more scratched CDs! You'll need a large hard drive, but even a 20G drive holds a fair number of games.

This technique works great for my grown-up games, too. Snag the image and forget fumbling for CDs. Daemon Tools emulates common copy-protection schemes, and I have yet to find a game (kiddie or grown-up) that can't be played with the image instead of the CD itself.

You could try BlindWrite

Blurb from the page: What's all this, then?

The BlindWrite suite is a tool designed to perfectly reproduce most CD.

To be or not to be (RAW mode compatible) ?

RAW mode is needed to produce perfect backups of some protected CDs !

DAO mode is even better. Almost all protected CD can be perfectly backed up using with DAO.

Blindread / Blindwrite are perfect tools to produce backups in RAW and DAO mode.

Don't know if that's what you mean?

Michael

As another idea, how about Nero Burning ROM's "ignore illegal TOC type" option? Or CloneCD, or ddump?

That's just on Windows - dd if=/dev/cdrom of=image.raw would probably work correctly, when combined with cdrecord, cdrdao and company.

Remember, this is Macrovision - the company responsible for the SafeDisc CD game protection system [thank you BlindRead]and their infamous video mechanism. I have a DVD card in my PC, and only RF output into my TV. So video out has to go through my VCR's SCART, and so I have to crack my Creative DXR3 to remove Macrovision. In doing so, I happen to come across an ability to pirate my DVDs to VHS - something I don't want to do.

All copy protection ever does is hassle the legitimate user. The big pirates found ways around Macrovision almost as soon as the system came out. It's the same with their game copy protection as well - you can just patch the game. It'll be the same here. Only the consumer will lose.

Let's just say for a minute that this protection scheme really works. Let's say it doesn't break compatibility with regular cd players. Let's say we somehow can't raw read it even with something hardcore like blindread. There is a simple way around these sort of protection schemes, and its name is VAC.

VAC (Virtual Audio Cable) is based off the idea (mentioned in a few other posts) of looping physical cables from your soundcard's output to it's input to record the audio. VAC creates a wave i/o device (or multiple i/o devices, but only one is needed for this sort of thing) that can be selected as your wave out device, and also as your wave in device in a recording program (soundforge, wavelab, hell even microsoft sound record would work). To the player you are simply listening to your cd, but in reality the signal is recorded without ever leaving the digital domain, and you now have a perfect copy.

The only downside to this is that you must do it all in real time. But of course once you've done it, then its a regular unprotected file, so do with it what you will. Also note that this works for recording real audio and other streams that are not supposed to be able to be recorded.