Copy protected cd games

Log in or Sign up. AfterDawn Discussion Forums. This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. Learn More. Hello, I would like to backup copies of a few of my copy-protected PC games.

I scanned my game, and it says it has SecuRom protection on it. Then I burn it to a disk, put it in the drive and wait. It brings up the game screen, then says I have to make sure the game disc is in the drive. It kept doing this until I downloaded Daemon-Tools and ran the Emulator.

Is there a way to burn copy-protected games and play them with out the need for an emulator? AhrenBa , Dec 22, Hey, Thanks for the input. One thing that I was wondering is the exact definition of a " copy"? Is that where the burned copy is the exact same as the original disc and no emulation is needed to play?

Also, how do I tell if I have a "good burner" or which burners indeed are good for this? Does the type of burner alone determine if you could make a copy successfully? Or what does? Thanks for your help! I appreciate it. AhrenBa , Dec 24, Ok, cool. Thanks again. So basically, what you are saying is pretty much all new games have to be copied and ran with emulation in order to work?

The occasional buffer underrun created very expensive drinks coasters. Yep, I remember my first CD writer in and it was the sort of thing where nobody had them and everyone ended up going to "that guy" who had one when they wanted things burned. It took 35 minutes to burn a disc and if anyone jumped in the room or your OS decided to take a crap instead of filling the write buffer you'd end up with a rather expensive coffee coaster.

I would remove one reason listed and add one not listed. The reason that it could take a long time to copy a CD was not a deterrent to piracy. It took a long time to copy a 7 - 10 disk games to another 7 - 10 disks. The reason I would add is that in the early days of CD-Rs, they were only single layer, which means they only held half as much data as a manufactured dual-layer CD-ROM. That made many disks uncopyable.

ToddWilcox The important thing is that pretty much everyone could copy floppies - all you needed was two disk drives or a HDD. With CDs, it took quite a while for burners to become commonplace, so it was quite typical that one guy with a burner supplied hundreds of people with bootleg software, music and games.

So floppy copying was highly parallelized - a friend came for a visit, you made a copy for yourself. CD burning wasn't for a few years; I've known a guy who had something like 16 burners just to keep up with the demand back then we didn't even understand the concept of SW piracy :D.

Show 8 more comments. RonJohn 4 4 silver badges 8 8 bronze badges. RodH RodH 3 3 silver badges 2 2 bronze badges.

Though only until HDD capacity caught up. Then software drivers to emulate CD drives and create disc images, including the defects , started showing up. What first started copying the defects that jmbpiano mentions, I wonder?

Would that be on topic here? On a specific track? I assume you mean on a specific sector, because data on a CD is arranged in a single spiral track.

I seem to remember the discs for the original Playstation had these defects, and one of the programs that could copy those defects was Nero Burning ROM.

Some defects can be copied, some can't; it depends on the drive. The trouble for the people creating the protection schemes is that some defects notably those that are expected to return different data when re-read are handled differently by different drives, so some schemes risk locking out legitimate users. The fancy virtual CD drivers that emulated defects made this obsolete. Show 4 more comments. The Long Read To start with, CD production was, at that time mostly confined to 'real' CDs and in a factory setup, as writeables not only where prohibitively expensive, but also did not always produce a result readable on cheap CD-ROM drives.

Raffzahn Raffzahn k 18 18 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. I don't recall the size of DVDs being much of a piracy deterrent.

DVD writers came out less than a year after the DVD format was standardized, and hard drives large enough to hold one weren't unreasonably expensive. Mark DVDs didn't have the size issue because you could just burn the files to a handful of blank CDs.

CD burners were cheap by then, and DVD burners didn't take long to get cheap. Hah, and even with all those silly cutscenes, the hacker scene soon came up with compressed versions that could fit games on one CD anyway. The only real "defence" the games had was subtle bugs that maybe cropped up in the bootleg versions, which only really served to make the feel buggy :D — Luaan.

Add a comment. It's probably not exact but Sony back in the day had a really cool way of Protection against pirates: Simply said they changed the CD itself Michael Tsimmerman Michael Tsimmerman 2 2 bronze badges. Sony got it from CD-R, a joint Philips and Sony spec, which uses this technique, called Absolute Time in Pregroove as a backwards compatible way of letting the drive know that a disc is writeable. FWIW, the disc doesn't physically wobble. For the ATIP, the spiral "groove" has a slight wobble that the read head can pick up.

On a related note, some people asserted that the "black" plastic used on PlayStation games was part of the protection, but if you hold them up to the light you can see it's actually dark red, transparent to the IR laser.

Many games that were shipped on floppies had copy protection - sometimes a question in the beginning that asked you to look at the booklet it came with, Monkey Island had a disk with 2 parts that you needed to set according to instructions to get the right answer.

It was obviously much harder to distribute pirated copies then than it is now. The internet wasn't a thing so you were fairly limited in what you could acquire. Generally one of your friends had to actually buy the game.

Sharing of games was fairly common, though. Monkey Island had "Dial A Pirate"!! I forgot all about that. Funnily enough, many games had their copy protection removed when they were re-published on CD! I haven't played games since then but I had assumed it was much harder to pirate now. Don't most of these games require an active connection to some game server, this "game as a service" model? Sidebar Sidebar.

Forums Software Windows. JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding. Previous Next. DTSS Member. Apr 4, 0 0. Today, Nero is my CD-burning software of choice. It's rock-solid, it's easy-to-use, and it works great for burning and backing up data and music CDs.

But it can't handling copy-protected data CDs such as games. Most new games released in the United States have some form of copy protection. Most of these solutions work by duplicating errors.

When it's created, a copy-protected data disc is burned with unique errors or physical flaws. Under normal usage these errors are ignored. But when you try to copy the disc, the CD-burning software tries to correct these errors. After receiving the first few errors, the burning software decides the disc is damaged and aborts the burn.

Backing up your games is a two-step process: You must identify the type of copy protection used on your games. But how? Use the Internet. Under Datatype choose the copy protection of your game. Click Next and begin your burn. Choose Datatype. Select the copy protection of your game.

Click Backup. This will create a duplicate CD image on your hard drive. Once you have the image on the hard drive, you can mount it as a virtual CD drive and run the game directly from your hard disk. BennyD Banned. Sep 1, 2, 0 0. Mar 7, 1, 0 0.

Apr 2, 75 0 0. TheWart Diamond Member. Dec 17, 5, 1 HomerSapien Golden Member. Jul 19, 1, 0 0. I havent used an up to date version for some time, but they still work for me. For back up ONLY. SaigonK Diamond Member. Aug 13, 7, 3 0 www.