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Mysteries Of The CDRW and Backups Revealed
Talinom writes "Tom's Hardware has a story that details information regarding some of the new (and old) copy protection schemes out there, as well as results from several different CDRW drives. There are a lot of sites devoted to this topic, but Tom's is usually rather thorough."
Agreed wholeheartedly.
.exe file of most programs and remove the copy protection check on a assembly language level. It's quite clever how they go about it, sometimes. New schemes always seem to get defeated within days of release.
Crackers just disassemble the
The only copy protection I've ever seen that actually worked was the CD-Key method for online games. If your game didn't have a valid CD-Key, then you were denied access to multiplayer, it was checked against the server so the checking routine was unassailable. Even a key generator didn't work because the producers of the game knew which keys they had released, and which ones they hadn't.
And they had your IP address if you tried war-dialing CD codes.
Clever as hell.
Slogan-free since April! We pass the savings on to you!
So you say, but I certainly haven't seen any evidence of this, not in the last 3 years.
Before then, THG was one of the better sites on the web (that I knew about at least). Now I will only go there if I'm really bored or looking for a laugh. www.tech-report.com, www.aceshardware.com or www.realworldtech.com are SO much more informed.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
In tom's review, clonecd was not able to handle the safedisk 2.51 (the disk2 cd) copy protection. If you check the clone cd compatibility page ( http://elby.ch/english/products/clone_cd/writers/ L.html ), you'll notice a "correct efm encoding" heading. Any burner that has two stars (well actually sheep) under this heading can handle safedisk 2.51 with no problems WITHOUT the use of clonecd's amplify weak sector feature, as the burner itself handles this at a hardware level. I have personally tested this on my computer, backing up Medal of Honor, using a liteon 163-dvd drive as the source drive and a liteon 24102b as the writer. I used Clone Cd 4.013. Tom's also used a liteon 24102b and was unable to copy safedisk 2.51 . I am not sure what they did wrong, but i suspect the source drive might of been the problem.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Disk 1 is one of the NHL series from Electronic Arts. Probably NHL 2002. If you look closely, you can see the NHLPA logo.
The only known Tages-protected game is "Moto Racer 3". Does anyone have one to compare the artwork to Disk 3?
Ooga Booga for Dreamcast had something sortof like that, but easier to crack. See, if it detected that you were using a burned copy of the game, it would instead of starting, display a dancing pirate (one ofthe characters from the game) with the words "PIRACY DETECTED" over its head.
Needless to say, the DC group that cracked it (I can't remember if it was Echelon or someone else) left the pirate in, because it was absolutely hilarious, and made a bypass for it.
Y2K Compliant since the late 1890s
Possibly, but it should be my choice. As an example, if I want to play a game on a laptop on a plane, my only choice is to pack my CD drive with me to do it, even if all the program does is periodically ping the CD drive to make sure the CD is in the drive. Well, that may not seem like a problem, except that it wastes battery life, and more importantly keeps me from plugging in the second battery, so I have to play complete games to get multiple batteries of life going (usually by exiting and restarting the program, which seems okay until you're in the middle of an AoE II game and don't want to exit!
Also, I always play with the game sound turned off. I hate the music that comes with the games. Why can't I then use my CD drive for other things simultaneously on a game that doesn't have a real requirement for that kind of disk space?
I guess the bigger thing is that really, I want it to be my choice, because there are situations like this where I really just don't want to have to deal with having the CD in the drive.
I purchased a product called the Opcode Sequencer (some early MIDI fans might recognize this). It had one of the most obnoxious schemes I've seen. First, it limited you to two installs. After that, either the master floppy had to be in the drive, or you weren't going to be using the software. I think Performer used something similar for a while (and it still may). I was never one for actively trying to circumvent copy protection for the purpose of using software without paying for it, but it really ticked me off that companies made it overly difficult to use the software that you HAD paid for. In this light, I was glad to see that someone had hacked thorugh this particular scheme. Legitimate owners should not have to worry about this kind of nonsense.
These days, vendors use machine-specific licence keys generated via a challenge/response system. So, you can backup your software against distribution media failure, but you're potentially screwed if you lose the hard disk because any replacement disk will have a different protection key, and you'll need to convince the vendor that, yes, your disk is dead (or that you've upgraded your machine) rather than wanting to give the software to a friend.
There is one totaly legit way of doing the same thing without having to use a NoCD patch.
Juste install Daemon-Tools. It's a wonderfull little program that lets you mount an ISO file as if it was a standard CDDrive. It's free (as in beer), tiny ( ~400Kb), and works like a charme on Win2k/98/XP.
It can even emulate some form of copyprotection like Safedisc, SecureRom and LaserLock.
All you have to do to play your favorite game is create a RAW (1:1 image) copy of your original game CD, and then mount the image as a CD drive.
Really a brilliant little program.
Murphy