Slashdot Mirror
Keeping Children's Software on a Networked Server?
mache asks: "I have a seven year old son with his own Windows 98 machine and he has many, many educational and game CDs that his stupid parents have purchased for him. These CDs often get lost and scratched. Many of these applications will not operate without the CD being in the CD drive. At an average of $20 or more, I want to be able to load a CD on to a Linux server once and then access the application through Samba. I understand that there are some applications out there that provide a 'virutal' CD player interface to a remote server and may defeat the copy protection mechanisms (deliberately placed bad tracks) in place on kid/game/educational CDs. I bought the CDs legitimately and just want to use them legitimately rather than having my son destroy them, forcing me to buy him new ones. Does anyone have a recommendation for a Windows-based application that would produce a 'virutal' CD player on a Windows 98 machine and also defeat currently used CD copy protection allowing some sort of CD image to reside on my in-home networked server."
Most Windows apps don't really need the CD in the drive. Usually it's a matter of the install disk location (which is usually the CD-ROM drive) that determines where the program looks. Simply copy the contents of the CD to a network directory and install from there.
Keep a CD in the drive just in case the program is looking for something. A music CD works fine in most cases.
I have been pwned because my
I think a seven year old should first learn respect for for the CDs. I mean education is the aim of the game. Letting them learn all these hi tech skills on the computer, should really include teaching him how to respect CDs and hardware etc.
I think once he destroys his favourite disk, and learns that such behaviour means that one of his possessions is no longer available to him, then he will have learnt a lesson more useful to him than whatever the software itself is trying to teach.
the only technology you need to solve this problem is a wooden paddle and a strong backhand.
;)
create ISO's from your favourite CD burning software and use Daemon-Tools to map that ISO over the network and you wont have any more problems
`find / -name "*your_base*" -exec chown us:us {} \;`
www.daemon-tools.net has tools for copying CDs and copes with safedisk protection
CJC
Can you use mkisofs to copy them into an iso9660 image then mount 'em loopback, and share the mountpoints via samba?
:)
I did this with a primary school client of ours, but I have no idea how copy protection is these days - I don't really play games or use/recommend commercial software!
Prisoner #655321
Last month on this. I'm using it now, works great. Uses Samba and autofs to mount iso images on the fly. The only problem is that some installers won't work because it's not coming off a cd drive. Anyone know how to fix that? Thanks,
That was true four or five years ago, but not today. There are many copy-protection mechanisms in place on contemporary CD-ROM games which really do require the CD to be inserted, such as SafeDisc, SafeDisc 2, LaserLok, and Securom.
Fortunately, Daemon Tools defeats most forms of such CD-check copy protection, and new fixes are being incorporated all the time.
http://www.daemon-tools.net/main.htm is the place to get Daemon Tools. It's a virtual CD-ROM drive which not only mounts CD images, it will also emulate the proper security mechanism that the origional CD would have.
Anyone who wants to copy a copy-protected CD, or host CD images for a virtual CD-ROM drive, should read the tutorials on that site I referenced.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
As the EULA probably says you only leased the program, I'd return the faulty disk to the company with a stamped self addressed envalope and a writable CD and a covering letter to the effect that you would like them to copy onto the CD sufficent SW to be able to continue using their program.
Wouldn't it be nice if schools got all the money they wanted and the army had to hold jumble sales for guns
"I have a seven year old son with his own Windows 98 machine and he has many, many educational and game CDs that his stupid parents have purchased for him...."
It's early, no blood-level caffeine yet etc. but this gets me for some reason...can't put my finger on it quite, though.
OK, getting the l'il unit involved with comps is great but ya gotta give yourselves some credit here.
OT...why, sointley.
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand". -Milton F.
There is a program called Daemon Tools.
.iso images, cdrwin, clonecd, and other cd and dvd images. It also emulates various cd copy protection schemes.
It runs on Win95/98/ME, and NT4/W2K/XP.
It'll mount
Programs/apps/games think its a real CD in a real CD-Rom drive, because it installs a 'virtual SCSI card', and 'virtual SCSI CDrom/DVDrom'. Its as real as it can get. But the driver doesn't talk to actual physical hardware, it just talks to a file on your local or remote filesystem.
So. Use CloneCD (or whatever, but clonecd is definitely best) and image all your kids' CDs onto the linux server. And use daemon tools to mount the cd images over samba.
I hardly use any CDs anymore. I have literally 100s of CloneCD image's on my fileserver, and just mount them using Daemon-Tools over Samba.
You will LOVE this program!
D.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
Depending on how many CD-ROM games the little tyke has that are on the verge of destruction, and at the risk of sounding like an idiot, why not burn extra copies of the CD-ROMs? Burned copies are cheap, you can always just burn another one if the other one doesn't work due to scratches, etc... Also unless you have some type of massive CD-ROM rack sitting in a closet at home (which wouldn't surprise me coming from a /. reader) someone will have to swap the CD-ROMs out of the drive in the linux box. You are at work and your son wants to play a game but no one is around to swap the CD-ROM out of the linux box so he goes ahead and tries anyways. He either suceedes and drops the thing on the floor scratching it even more and leaving you with a really cool way to mount a scracthed CD-ROM over a cross platform network. The other possibility is he doesn't know to unmount the drive (unless you have autofs or something) and he tries to manually pull out the CD-ROM try from the drive, giving you more dammage. Yeah having a program create an image on the computer from a remote source or even from the computer its self is nice, but I think its too much and has too much that could go wrong with it. Okay, I'm done....
eh, food for thought...
As I have said before in a previous post, If you have legitimately purchased the software, and the copy protection is causing you problems, you are IMHO, perfectly entitled to crack the copy protection.
There are essentially two ways to crack the program. (besides just making a CDR copy).
1. Search the web or usenet for a crack, produced by one of the many cracking organisations. This usually works well for teenage games, especially those popular at LAN parties. I don't know if it will work for educational stuff interned for kids.
A google search for "<program name> no-cd crack" should produce results, but be prepared for many annoying pop-ups, pornographic banners, broken links etc.
2. Alternatively you could crack it yourself, as this is often quite easy if you have programming skills.
The usual approach is to run the program under a debugger, tracing the program as it starts up with & without the key disc present. The just patch the executable so that the check is not performed, or the result ignored.
Needless to say, you should only apply such techniques to programs you own, and you should not share the results with anyone who does not also own a legit copy of the software.
works great in windoze. linux has some good options too.o classics.com/howto.html
n dex.htm l
http://www.daemon-tools.com/
http://www.is
and for linux
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/CDServer-HOWTO/i
From my experience to change CD's in Daemon tools you have to click on the tools icon, and select the image manually, and isn't there also a limit on 4 cd's at once?
The question here is useablity for a 7year old. I can't really see that this is a major issue, but it isn't the most user friendly of tasks to do, popping cds into a tray and waiting for them to auto load - easy.
I forget what they're called, but I've seen some tools at the store that advertise their ability to remove scratches by sanding down the CD.
Have you read my journal today?
I found the daemon tools suggest wonderful - but
if it's Mac software? Does anyone sell or have
utilities for that platform???
Have you compiled your kernel today??
If not, you are an unfit parent.
If so, it's a good one. I'd rate it a 9.
On their web site is a utility that will allow you to associate hotkeys with a disc image:
Daemonmounter 1.01
A program allowing you to put keyboard shortcuts on up to 10 images. Just press your shortcut and the image will be mounted.
it appears that the poster just called himself stupid.
Whilst I appreciate your willingness to comment on others' child rearing techniques, no doubt from your own vast experience as an educator and parent, I don't think you've addressed the question.
My own children are 3 (as of two weeks ago) and 5 (soon to be six). Both are fond of computer games; the 3-year old plays "Elmo's Playhouse" (which is a superb educational tool - kudos to Children's Workshop!) and the 5-year old has been playing the Richard Scarry "Best Math" and "Best Reading" games for nearly two years now.
I'm getting tired of replacing the Elmo CD, and I've had to replace the CD drive itself once already (and it's broken again now, but maybe I can glue it back together). I will try the Daemon tools and see how it goes.
You do realize a children don't have fully developed fine motor control, right?
I know at my local Best Buy they sell these plastic covers that you put on the cd to reduce scratching. You can find them too (probably), they are in the computer department where all the cd carrying binders are.
Yes, it's a bit more work, and the daemon-tools that everyone's mentioning look nice, but TMTOWTDI, and for me one of the other ways is with VMware.
The other benefit being, if you set it up right, the critter will have his own "sandbox" and can blown up the VM but it's really easy to back up the VM's directory, so when s/he does take the machine down, you can bring it back in a couple minutes of copying, rather than a couple hours of reinstalling.
The drawback? Fast games won't be.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
You could check out GameCopyWorld and see if your games are listed. While its main purpose may seem to be questionable, it is nice to be able to install your games without having to hunt through your CD wallet each time you want to play.
The dogcow says "Moof!"
I've used CDSpace for quite a while and really really like it.
Look at http://www.cdspace.com to find it.
It's not free, but it's inexpensive. It has worked on EVERY game I've ever bought. You just scan an image into a disk file and then you can just mount the file.
If you're setting up your kid's machine, I'd probably mount the files locally. Also, for minimum hassle, I would create a whole bunch
of drives, one for each application so you don't have to switch files.
The system would have a set-top box running some Microsoft OS, connected to servers, using an IP network laid over the cable lines (basically like what cable modems do today, except it would only connect to the cable headend, not the Internet beyond).
We wanted to let users run CD-ROM games on the set-top box with the actual CD images on the central computer. So somebody investigated how easy this was to do. Now we are probably talking about a beta of Windows 95 on the client and these are old CD-ROMs conforming to the "MPC" spec. Anyway the guy discovered that most of these games stored the drive letter of the CD-ROM in the win.ini or somesuch place (what would be the registry these days) and if you simply copied the CD-ROM to a network share, mapped that network share to a local drive letter, and changed win.ini, many of them would still work. But some didn't.
Now that was a long time ago and who knows if it would still work (although some of the childrens CDs probably date from that era). Also this is the days of 1X CD-ROMs doing 150 kilobytes/second, which was reasonable to expect to achieve on a 10 megabit/second ethernet. Nowadays with a 100 megabit/second ethernet in yor house, you might get the performance of about a 24X CD-ROM drive (which will probably be fine).
May not be the most useful info but it reminded me of that story so I wanted to share.
- adam
I worked at a school district that had one of these setup, for the same purpose.
Zerver
It had a CDROM so you could 'rip' CD's right from the tower.
You could tell him, "hey you scratch it, it's gone, no more game." After the 3rd or 4th loss he'll learn to take better care of things. He's 7 not 2.
Daemon Tools allows you to mount a 1 to 1 copy of a CD (an ISO image, not a file copy) as a virtual CD. It also emulates most (if not all) of the current "copy protection" schemes in use.
Note that you must keep the ISO around if you want to continue to use the CD. With the files ranging in size from 50 or so Meg to 700 Meg or more, this can quickly eat up space. With disk prices being as cheap as they are, this isn't as big of a problem as it was in years past.
You'll also need a good duplication package for that 1 to 1 copy mentioned above. I have had very limited success with Adaptec's Easy CD Creator and no success at all with Veritas' CD Pro software.
The one package I've yet to have a problem with is CloneCD. This product also seems to be able to copy most "copy protected" discs with the schemes intact on the duplicate; a nice bonus.
Daemon Tools is fairly intuitive for the stuff it's doing and it's also the only software I've used that loaded a Windows VXD and didn't require a reboot after doing it. It is not, however, 4-year-old intuitive, so you'll probably have to either mount the ISO images as separate drive letters or mount them for your kid yourself.
Hope that helps.
There's so little difference between politics and jihad lately...
I've used CloneCD too. Never had any problems. It very nicely duplicates all the copy-protection bits as well as the actual data... Works wonders for making backup copies of games and such.
In constrast to my cdrom drives, which corrupt the data as it's read off the "copy-protected" discs about 50% of the time, rendering the software unusable. (Had to create a non-copy-protected "correct" disk to install the software, and a second "copy-protection-enabled" disk to actually use the software. Does anyone else besides me think it's nuts that these "copy-protection" systems require me to make TWO copies before I can even run the software?)
Actually, Daemon Tools supports commandline options, so you can create shortcuts that (using a batch file) automatically mount the required image:
---begin cdrun.bat---
"c:\program files\d-tools\daemon.exe" -unmount 0
"c:\program files\d-tools\daemon.exe" -mount 0,%1
cd %2
%3
---end cdrun.bat---
Then create shortcuts to the batch file that supply
image file, program directory and program name in that order, and you're set.
(Lines 1 and 3 may not actually be needed)-- I haven't tested.
Lots of pretty good ideas here. I do this for an elementary school. Some of the older educational software intended to be used as 1 cdrom per workstation can work over a network just fine. Either copy it to an app server, or use a cdrom tower. Newer titles are harder. Sometimes there's an init file on your windows workstation(I forget; i'm at home) that sets cdrom to "d". You can change this to another mapped drive. In my experience, you'll have to use 3-4 different methods, and tinker a little bit, but you'll get it eventually. Personally, I don't handle cdroms properly all the time, so It's hard to expect kids to do so. And yes, you could burn yourself extra copies for the inevitable scratched/broke cdrom
I gotta ask - are these crippled CDs still compliant with the appropriate CD specifications, or are they doing their own thing and counting on the public remaining ignorant and apathetic?
Under the Fair Use rules established years ago, I have a right to an archival copy in case the original is destroyed, and no EULA can force me to "treat the original media as the archival disc for the purpose of compliance with Federal laws." If I buy a "CD-ROM," I expect to be able to make a usable archival copy at my own expense, and that includes burning it to a single CD or storing it in a collection of ISO images on a larger hard disk.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I know this may be too late to get read, but oh well...
One of my coworkers has two sons, about two and four, and he's in the same situation. His solution was to put all of their game CDs into caddies and get an old caddy-loading SCSI CD drive for their computer.
It's still not perfect protection, but it certainly stops most of the casual scratching and such.
--saint
My kids have been handling CD's since they were 3 and doing it just fine(tray and slot drives.) Show them the right way and wipe them sticky hands off. Good thing CD's are plastic. I've washed quite a few with soap and water.