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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."
There are so many different copy protection schemes out there. Some are really simple, like throwing some file in an obscure directory on the user's hard disk. Others are really complicated, involving the detection of various debuggers that might be present and working around them in such ways that the software can't be broken.
When it comes down to it, copy protection is just like system security. In system security, as we all know, the programmers have to find security holes before the 1337z h4x0rz do, and close those holes. (Remembering to enjoy a Negra Modelo after each security hole is closed.) Similarly, copy protection is a war between the implementer and the hacker. The only difference between copy protection and security is that the roles are reversed: In security, the implementer is the good guy and the h4x0r is the bad guy. In copy protection, the implementer is the evil force and the h4x0r who breaks it is the good guy. That's a fact, and breaking of copy protection should be rewarded with large sums of money by the implementer. Call it a sort of fine on copy protection that doesn't work. In other words, anybody who implements copy protection will eventually go bankrupt because it will get broken eventually.
Yes, I still remember with horror the "good old" copy protections some amiga games compaines made. Non-dos disks that made the entire amiga shake as the disk drive desperately tried to read the crypted disk. The sound resembled snoring and could be heard miles away.
I had a friend who couldn't play some games late at night because the drive woke up his parents! Some games could not even be loaded on older drives because of the "shaking". In addition the disks also came with a nonstandard bootblock making all anti-virus software go mad and easy for viruses to destroy the game.
My drive finally gave up the ghost after a few years playing with them copyprotected games. The same fate happened to all my amiga friends at one point. Some were lucky to still have the commodore warranty still valid. Others had to fork out a fair amount.I was one of the lucky.
I myself, being a flightsim nut, used to play Falcon. Unfortunately it came with such a nifty copy protection that not even X-copy could make a backup. As a result I lost the game one day when the disk, despite good care, became corrupted. Unable to find a pirate copy I was (and still am) without a good game I paid honest money for. Sadly, I also bought F16 Combat pilot and the same thing happend to that one. Backup could not be made. The disk became corrupted....
Fortunately a friend of mine had a cracked version... I have yet to see a pirate suffer from a protection that is impossible to crack. The only suffering has been done by the owners of originals ( I am refering strictly to the owners of amiga non-dos copy protected games that were so common in those days).
These problems persist into today. Another friend of mine lost a hard drive and blames SafeDisc copy protection on a recent game for it.
So, can anyone here, with hand on heart, really say those copy protections did more good than harm?
Scientists are baffled by the seemingly improbable disappearance of Tom's Hardware from reality.
The RIAA is quoted as saying:"There is no spoon"
crazy dynamite monkey
keep copies protected is to not give them out.
Maybe these companies should stop selling the programs entirely. That would stop the piracy.
Linux is dead.
LU
"Tom's is usually rather thorough."
:)
Yes, Tom's Hardware is usually thorough, but it is also usually thoroughly wrong--at least, the reviews written by other than Tom. Read through them. Look at the numbers shown on, say, the CPU articles and see if they have anything to do with the conclusion. I'm serious--not trolling (at least, not intentionally
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
99% of the people who want copies of software don't have to worry about copy protection- someone else has broken it for them.
They merely need to use their P2P client of choice to download a cracked image of the CDs.
Remember last April when Andreessen said "If a computer can see it, display it and play it -- it can copy it,..."
Article found here.
As Dan Briklin says "With ever changing technology, in order to preserve many works we will need to constantly move them ahead, copying them to each new media form before the previous one becomes obsolete. Also, as we create new media, we need to preserve the knowledge of the methods of converting from one media to another, so we can still access the old works that have not yet been moved ahead. This is crucial. Without this information, even preserved works could be unreadable.
The most famous example of that type of translation information was an inscribed slab of rock from 196 BC found in 1799. It contained a decree written in Greek that was also written in two forms of Egyptian. It's called the Rosetta Stone. It let scholars finally read ancient works in hieroglyphics that they had physical possession of but whose language had been a mystery for 1,400 years (despite being common for the 3,500 years before being superseded). Cuneiform, a form of writing used by many ancient civilizations, was similarly opaque to scholars until they found a text in multiple languages carved into a cliff -- the Behistun inscription."
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
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"?
You're talking about the gronk noise - its got its own entry in the jargon file.
gronk
I think it has more to do with the fact more Amiga's used Chinon floppy drives which are noisy as it is, but also most amigas don't have that sringly door flap on them - which just makes them noisier.
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!
My Plextor CDRW drives coupled up with CloneCD has yet to fail me in making "personal backups" of any Audio of Game CD that I've purchased.
Duris MUD - The best pkill MUD. Ever.
The fact that this kind of protection is easy to defeat even for people without access to cracks, by simply copying a manual or writing down the relevant keywords doesn't exactly speak for it. Content encryption a la CSS used on DVDs isn't the same as the copy protection of games
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
The other difference is that once a hole is found in a system, it can be patched.
Once you've shipped some physical object and the security on it has been breached, you are up a creek!
One of the best scheme's I've heard of is one where there was a way of spoofing certain keys. The implementer knew this and when one of these hacked keys were entered it turned on the "RANDOM BUG" boolean, which would drop things mid process, panic your machine, etc. etc. He was quite smug when he thought of this.
I don't think he could get a patent on it. I think the BSOD is an example of prior art!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I also managed to copy CD2 of MoHAA with no problems... Can't remember if I used my CD-ROM drive (some cheapy brand... maybe Delta) or my Plextor 8432T burner as the source, and obviously I used the Plextor to burn the image.
Forget which version of CloneCD I used, too... my system's been through a format & reinstall since then. Point is, I had no problems copying the CD either...
- Jester
I know this may seem just a tad off topic, but I've read a ton of articles at Tom's Hardware, and I think I must mention something about the format of his web site. I don't particularly like that articles are split into a number of pages, and you have to wait for each one to load. Why can't the whole article be on the same page. Download it once, and read the whole thing from beginning to end. I believe that is the better way to do it, as it reduces the number of requests to the web server, and allows you to save an entire article for later reading, when you're possibly disconnected from the network.
As far as this particular article is concerned, I think it's quite detailed, and I like that. It's all about reading about the old technologies that made the computing industry what it is today. Makes me want to have a Negra Modelo.
Don't know about CD-Rs, but I have heard about double-sided DVD-Rs, and, indeed, they do have holes in them.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The other good protections that I have seen dealt with having to enter in words from the pages of the instruction manual (which could be defeated by copying the whole manual...) but most people didn't go and copy a 100 page manual.
No, those aren't so good. I hacked around one of those in an old D&D-style game on Macintosh II Cx owned by a guy down the hall back in college.
The "copy protection" was like this: Every time you wanted to cross a bridge, you had to answer a question, 'ere the other side you see. (No flying into the chasm if you got it wrong, though. You just couldn't cross) Well, it had a list of words, paired up with Page 37 word 5 and such. There were maybe 200 choices. What the program did was to look at what you typed in, and then look up the right answer based on page (x) word (y).
My simple hack was to populate the field where you type in the word with the answer the program looks up one line later to see if you got it right. It worked AND you got to see what the word was, which I think was useful somewhere else in the game.
I think I did this using (pirated) Norton DiskDoctor and MacsBug, but there might have been some other coding apps involved. It was *really* easy, a fun project for a few hours spread out over a few nights.
That mac (and his roommate's mac, and playing Oids, and Spectre over appletalk) is why my GPA plummeted from 3.3 to 1.6 in my second semester. I only wish I'd stayed with coding, now I can't code hello world unless it's in HTML. Such is the life of the Microsoft Certified Professional.
I wish terrorism would hurry up and surrender.
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?
Consider:
Wellcome
Next Page-->
to Toms Harware where we
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Discuss the new anti copying
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schemes that affect your CD-R
VS
Spock I never (pause) wanted (pause) you to dress (pause) like a (pause) tribble (pause) and tracktor beam (pause) me from behind (pause) you burning hulk (pause) of Vulcan (pause) man meat
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
the animation people (ILM, Disney etc) all pirate software. lately that really high end stuff has been becoming affordable for the noncommercial user. But they had no option in the past. they needed to learn and become better, and not pay more than their car cost for a program. There companies obvisousely had legit copies
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]
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.
Ever since I got an 80 gig hard drive. I just burn CloneCD images of games I buy and use Daemontools to create a near foolproof virtual CD drive with which to run the game. I don't look around for CDs anymore, I just select the image from the menu and off I go.
The downside is that it takes about twice the space because the install program usually installs the whole kit and kaboodle and then you've got the CD image.
It works over great over LANs too. We put images of commonly used network games(starcraft, red alert 2) on a simple fileserver(my old P-75 w/6 gig HD). Whenever my roommates and I want to play a game, we all point to the same CD image on a network drive and off we go. No digging up CDs or anything. Most times, the games just check the image on startup and never look at it again so the server doesn't get overworked or anything.
Why not make a divx file? Its a laptop screen anyways? I like to watch futurama or simpsons in divx on my laptop, perfectly legal since I recorded it off my paid for dss service.
I highly doubt that he has any DVD-ROM games. If he does, he probably doesn't mind doing it for that.
I'm sure that he does mind having to find and swap out one of 30 CD's each time he wants to switch games, wait for the system to start responding thirty seconds after he puts the CD in, closing the autorun popup 'install' screen, starting the game, waiting for it to spin up the 52x so that it can read three sectors off of it, and praying that some hairline scratch on the surface doesn't cover one of those three sectors.
If you're a short-attention-span gamer like me, it's a lot more convenient to pick up a commodity 60gb drive, run cd-image-spoofing software or no-cd cracks than it is to set up a pile of CDROM drives so you can play your games at a whim.
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
When the headlines and the photos take up more space than the article itself, something is clearly not quite right.
When I go there I'm always half-expecting to see a half-naked girl holding a CPU (ATHLON 2300+ HOTTER THAN HOT - WE PROVE HOW AMD'S NEW CPU CAN SET FIRE TO YOUR HOUSE - DOWNLOAD OUR 745 MB VIDEO).
P.S. - To your list of reliable sites I'd add Anandtech. Yes, the articles are 20 pages long and each page only has about 5 sentences, but they are usually objective and well-written.
RMN
~~~
Using an Apple. Since Apple will not allow copy restricting software into their machines. Good or bad, you can at least make legit copies of your software with zero issues.
Anyone else remember the dark red code sheets that came with the original Simcity? They were dark red to prevent photocopying. You had to match the symbols with the population and give them the name of the city (I think).
My Grandfather had a copy of the game that we both wanted so my grandmother and I spend an afternoon copying the damn sheet out onto graph paper. It was like a game then (I was...12?). I wouldn't be caught dead doing that now.
I find it interesting that when Maxis rereleased the game on CD they killed the protection. I almost would've liked them to include it for the history of it. Almost.
Triv
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.
Same here (Plexwriter 10/12/32A).
The great thing about Plextors insn't the reading, though, it's the writing. I've never seen a CD burned in a Plextor fail anywhere. Which is more than I can say for a lot of other drives I've tried (Philips, HP, Sony, etc.), regardless of the CD-R brand.
Here's a table comparing the BLER (block error) ratio of several CD writers:
http://www.digit-life.com/articles/cdrw5/
RMN
~~~
Not much to say really, but if anyone is interested, here's the link to the article about Spyro - it's a great read. Here it is.
This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.
I personally call it copy prevention since it describes the technology in question and has the same acronym. Every time I read the term "copy protection", I cringe. Just count the number of times it's been used in the article...
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
It's the principle of the thing. If a program wants to copy everything to my hard drive, it had damned well better earn that disk space it's taking up. There is no legitimate reason why software that does this should require the CD. If you want the CD to be in the drive, you'd better have a tiny HD footprint. If you want a big one, then you'd damned well better not demand a CD.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Back in the early 90s alot of games used the 'look on page so-and-so in the manual and complete the phrase' method of protection.
-
while i generally subscribe to the "if you build it, they will crax0r it" school of thought, as far as i know bleemcast (bleem for dreamcast) was never successfully cracked. i don't know all the details of it's protection scheme (i haven't kept track of "the scene" in a while), but as i remember it involved tons and tons of bad sectors that rendered it practically impossible to copy.
i'm sure someone else knows/will correct me if i'm wrong...
--
Twinbee is lovely character. Perhaps you will enjoy with him?
Maybe slightly OT, but how well does dd measure up to apps like clonecd? Any one tried to copy these disks in linux?
/addons dir. In this way, 3 years from now when I want to play a game, I don't have to hunt down patches and the like. The only reason I have to put the crack in there is because the games won't play on my backup disks.
BTW, Even on disks I have purchaced, I have a habit of copying them to a custom cd I make along with the latest patches and game cracks under a
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
With regard to the review, it was ok, but really did little except sell the cheap sleeper drive over the more expensive ones....
:)
I think we need copy prevention for games. Not so much with online ones though because you can do things at the server that discourage casual copies. (Flame suit on
However, I also demand the ability to make backups, or take advantage of the hardware I own. (Putting several games onto DVD, or HardDisk really should be possible.)
So given the cost reductions in media production today, why not offer people a choice?
If you purchase the game through your standard shrink wrap vendor, then you get to live with the copy prevention methods. Same battle different day.
If you purchase from the publishing house directly, or better yet the game developers, you get unencumbered media with a catch:
Your name and address becomes part of the game as they burn a copy for you on demand. You get to make any copies you want, and they get to know if you start distributing them irresponsibly.
I did this long ago with a utility program I wrote for CADKEY. (Ez-Shapes BTW.) I did put a lot of time into the program and wanted my return, but also did not want to invest a lot more into something that had very little to do with my program just to get that return. Why? Lets just say that copy prevention schemes have caused me enough grief in the past that I did not want to be associated with them.
Each copy went out with the buyers name on it. I figured that the incentive to keep ones name clean was as good as any to prevent copies without undue restrictions on the buyer. I never did encounter how I was going to handle transfers because it never came up, but that could be a concern.
Maybe a worthy tradeoff though. What if your media was damaged? Since they *know* you are supposed to have it, maybe they can just make another for a small fee.
Something to think about anyway.
Blogging because I can...
>> Do you really want to copy all 8 GB of full-motion-video cut scenes of a DVD-ROM game to your hard disk?
> Well sure. What else am I going to do with a quarter-terabyte of hard drive space? I don't have that much porn.
Wait, so what's the DVD-ROM game you're copying?
I've become a master with Numega/Compuware's Driver Studio. It goes for $2500. The weird part is that other than a couple simple USB drivers I wrote, most of my Driver Studio experience has been cracking with SoftIce. The only guilt I feel is that I didn't pay for Driver Studio 2.6 and it really has proved itself a valuable cracking tool...
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
It amazes me that for all of our advances in technology over that past 20 years, we are still fighting some of the same battles with the same tactics.
//c, ...) were superceeded by Macs and PCs. I don't remember if the same issues appeared in software distributed on floppys for PCs; they may have learned something from the earlier apple ][ experience and tied their copy prevention system to something that was distributed in addition to the electronic media.
The tactics I am referring to are, of course, copy protecting the distribution media of the software. 20 years ago it was apple ][ software on floppy disks. The apple ][ disk controller didn't really process the data. It fed the raw flux transitions to the disk operating system. The software for the DOS was contained in the boot sector of each disk. To make a disk difficult to copy, you tweak how the DOS functioned to include things like positioning the heads between tracks or working around intentional imperfections in the disk media. These imperfections would cause errors for the standard DOS read routines, but the modified DOS would know to just skip around certain sectors.
To combat these and other copy protection schemes, many disk copying programs appear on various BBSs. Over time people built up a list of which copy programs to use against which type of protection scheme.
In the end, bit by bit copiers could copy most everything that was out there. Over time software publishers went the route of tying software to something that was less easily copyable like a word or number from the paper manual. Just like the licensing schemes of today.
As time went on, the apple ][ (][+,
From my point of view, we are repeating those same old steps. The difference is that users will probably accept some sort of copy protection scheme for software, such as software activation keys (the shareware world lives on this model). While this model is quite workable for software, it fails miserably when it is applied to pure data such as CDs. CD copying will continue, because it is data and not an executable program which can check for some sort of authentication or activation model.
Audio CDs are data. I repeat this because that is what sets them apart from software. That is also what sets them apart in the mind of the public.
-tpg.
Actually, they don't. I've sold into that market, and piracy hasn't been a problem with the major studios. Since animation houses tend to want features added to the big animation packages, there are often people on-site from the vendor. This keeps piracy down. Some of the smaller effects houses have trouble coming up with a credit card number that won't bounce, though.
A quick look on my favorite "Abandonware" sites shows no copy of the first Falcon game. Probably due to their method of intentional floppy corruption as copy protection...
However, take solace in your free copy of the third version of the series, Falcon 3.0:
http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=2128
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
Hmmm, I haven't flown in a while but I'm pretty sure every plane I've ever been on forbids CD drives anyway? Mabye I'm imagining it...
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
It doesn't come on CD does it?
Use virtual CD to make as virtual CD of virtual CD!
Oh, the *irony* !
:-)
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Ah I remember the days. Playing X-Wing on my old (386? 486?)...
That game had very stupid copy protection. The game would start, and would ask you a question by giving you a symbol that you had to find in the manual and type in its name.
Of course, one young teenager with a hex-editor (remember Norton DiskEdit?) was easily able to find all of the 'names' in one of the game's data files, and it was rather trivial to replace all of them with a single space. At the time it was all I knew how to do, because it was before my programming days.
It was quicker to do this than to try to find a crack on the BBSs out there. And yes, I have my own purchased copy of that game - I just hated having to keep flipping through the manual.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
If only Tom reviewed how well Linux cd recording software (cdrecord, et. al.) fared under the same circumstances...
Not everyone's primary box is a Windows machine, Taco...
> Remember Copy II+"
;-)
:) (Dos3.3 started at 0x9600)
;-)
What, no mention of COPYA, Muffin, Disk Muncher or Locksmith ?
I still remember how Copy ][+ had 1 BIG sector on tracks 2 and 3. The thing loaded *FAST*.
"Cracking Techniques" was a bunch of text files describing how to break each game protection. It even had a 'tut on Copy ][+. Copy the ROM over to the language card. Modify the RAM so that reset would enter the "monitor" (built in disassembler on the Apple), and then finally make the 16K language read only. Copy ][+ never checked for the language card, so voila, you had a memory image. Moving the memory down so that DOS 3.3 wouldn't clobber it, and then BSAVE COPY ][+, A$800,L$8E00
> all those cool things...like modified TOC's....
Sad, that I still remember that the DOS3.3 TOC was on track 17 after all these years. I like how some games would embed control-chars in the filename.
{rant}
My 8-bit Apple had 20 character filenames. Who's the dumbass that limits filenames to 8.3 in CPM and MSDOS ?
{/rant}
> Half tracks....
The Apple drive was actually capable of 1/4 tracks. I believe Broderbund games made use of it. Write a small section on track 0. Increment to track 1/4, write another small section. Repeat. Normally, tracks were 4 quarter tracks apart, due to interference from data written on quarter tracks.
> Modified sector headers....
The thing that made Apple games disk so much fun to backup was that the drive couldn't write 2 consequetive zeros (aside from Sync Bytes, which was 0xFF, followed by two zero bits.) Ah, the days of 5+3 (13 sector tracks) and 6+2 encoding (16 sector tracks). For 6+2, you expand a sector of 256 bytes out to 384 bytes.)
Some interesting technical info here http://www.enteract.com/~enf/afc/apple2
Little bit of history here http://apple2history.org/history/ah15.html
Then someone figured out that you *could* write a few "illegal" bytes, such as C5.
> having to use the nibble editor
Copy ][+ had a ton of options for it's nibble editor. And if you still couldn't make a backup, there was always the option of boot tracing the program. Remember how the first sector had to be delimited by D5 AA 96 because thats what the Disk Prom checked for.
Some interesting cracking technique from yore:
Wildcard and Replay were 2 interesting products. They generated a NMI and let you enter the disassembler. I wanted one, but found out that I didn't really need one after I learnt about that language card trick.
The other trick to "stop" a game, was to search for 30 C0, since that was the address of the speaker! (I was *so* thankfull Copy ][+ ver 7 added a search bytes function!) Change a few bytes, and now the game will stop when it tries to play a sound.
Cheers
No, no, no. This is not a sig.
Yes, he has cost the company nothing because he wouldn't have bought it anyway. But that 15 year old kid would be a god with a lesser tool as well. Maybe not a broadcast quality finished product at the same level as something done with 3DSMax or Maya, but up to the limits of the whatever tool s/he used.
Talent shows. His demo reel would display concepts like design, flow, use of color, etc. Not competence in a specific tool.
Just like a race car. Just because you're good at age 15 (even REALLY good), doesn't mean a high $ ride in NASCAR or F1. Show your stuff in gocarts and migets first. Then the boss will pick up the cost of the topline tool. Be it a Grand National car, or a $5000 software package.
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
A shrinkwrap/clickwrap EULA is all but worthless, regardless of what one judge on the loony coast of the USA said. If I buy it in WalMart it is a SALE. Back when Tandy made you sign a five part form to purchase anything in the computer dept, that was a LICENSE.
When you buy a game at Best Buy you are the owner of a copy of an item that is SOLD, not LICENSED therefore you are regulated by the copyright laws of your country and nothing else.
Democrat delenda est
CIV3
:( They made a patch available but only to people in the us, not to mention you had to give your phone number and street address before you could donload the dame thing!
I had to crack civ3 because it didn't work well with my DVD-rom
Not that I play it anymore, not until the multiplayer/scenario patch is out. But I bet we'll have to pay for it.
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
I should have emphasised the employees more. At ILM its all 100% legit. but when those employees go home, that copy of Maya downloaded and installed from the internet is not legal.