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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.
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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!
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.