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Mysteries Of The CDRW and Backups Revealed

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i'm-seeing-double dept.

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."

2 of 231 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Copy protection doesn't work. by NanoGator · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Crackers just disassemble the .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."

    I read an article on 'Spyro the Dragon' in Game Developer Magazine. The company that made that game had an amusing protection scheme: They performed several checks in the game for copy protection code. If one of them changed, then one of the 'keys' that the main character (in the game...) had to find would disappear, preventing the player from progressing to the next level.

    This meant that whoever was working on cracking the game had to play the game, level by level, and check for stuff that was missing. Heh.

    It took them an entire month to get the game fully cracked. That's all the team really needed because that's about as long as a game lasts on the shelf. (I think it was for PC, not PSOne...) Any longer than that, and the copy protection wasn't really benefiting them a whole lot.

    Personally, I find this story entertaining because I can imagine the crackers were tearing their hair out. Heh.

    Security by Annoyance.

    --
    "Derp de derp."
  2. This makes me feel nostalgic for the old days..... by Dr_Marvin_Monroe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Remember "CIA", "Disk Assassin" and even "Copy II+".....wow, that cool new color copy program on Tom's sure takes me back....all those cool things...like modified TOC's....Half tracks....Modified sector headers....having to use the nibble editor.....

    [salty sea pirate mode]
    ....there beeeen pirates in these waters since there was waters.....
    [/salty sea pirate mode]