Advice for newbie?

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3 total messages Started by Roderick Stewart Wed, 16 Mar 2005 11:34

#82270

Author: Roderick Stewart
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2005 11:34

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I have hardly any experience of commercial CD-based PC games, but 
decided to install a couple on a new computer I've just built for my 
daughter because I thought her kids might like them. This is where my 
puzzlement begins.

Although both games installed an enormous amount of material on the 
hard drive, and one even required me to enter a serial number, both of 
them seem to require that the original discs are in the drive before 
they will run, and I can't find any way to avoid this. Is this normal?

For fear that repeated handling by kids might damage these discs, I 
tried to make copies, but Nero reported read errors and gave up.

Even when the original discs are used, the machine takes a very long 
time to read them, accompanied by a lot of repetitive clicking noises 
like the ones you get when a CD drive is faulty. This makes me wonder 
if they are using an anti-copying strategy whereby the recordings are 
slightly non-standard but within the range of tolerances that they hope 
will allow them to be read on most normal drives. I've heard that 
Playstation discs are like this, hence the sale of little boxes to 
allow playing of backups made on a standard CD recorder.

The machine I used to try to make the copies is a different one from 
the one with the games, so two different CD drives are apparently 
struggling with these discs, though they both work just fine with 
anything else, and both games are by different publishers.

There doesn't seem to be any common factor except that both the 
"difficult" programs are games, hence my request for any advice to deal 
with them, or simply reasurance that this is quite normal and I'll just 
have to live with it. Every other program I possess, mostly costing 
considerably more than these games, will allow me to use them straight 
from the hard drive once they're installed, so why are the game 
publishers so paranoid about security, if that's what it is?

Rod.

Re: Advice for newbie?

#82271

Author: Raymond Martineau
Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2005 06:02

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On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 11:34:32 GMT, Roderick Stewart
<rjfs@escapetime.nospam.plus.com> wrote:

>I have hardly any experience of commercial CD-based PC games, but 
>decided to install a couple on a new computer I've just built for my 
>daughter because I thought her kids might like them. This is where my 
>puzzlement begins.
>
>Although both games installed an enormous amount of material on the 
>hard drive, and one even required me to enter a serial number, both of 
>them seem to require that the original discs are in the drive before 
>they will run, and I can't find any way to avoid this. Is this normal?

This is only normal in the sense of being industry standard.  Don't be
suprised, since the comptuer entertainment industry was known to release a
copy-protection for the C64 that would eventually cause your disk drives to
run out of alignment.  

>For fear that repeated handling by kids might damage these discs, I 
>tried to make copies, but Nero reported read errors and gave up.

You need to tell Nero to ignore any read-errors, and let it run for a few
hours.  However, this won't work as most burners don't write SafeDisc or
SecuROM compatable images.  You're better off getting a No-CD crack,
available at www.gamecopyworld.com.

Re: Advice for newbie?

#82272

Author: Roderick Stewart
Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2005 08:35

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In article <095i311ssa775ihvlmokjp2lvr3qrgar6c@4ax.com>, Raymond 
Martineau wrote:
> You're better off getting a No-CD crack, 
> available at www.gamecopyworld.com.

Thanks for this advice. I've had a quick look and at least one of the 
games is listed there. Now I just have to check the version number of 
the one I've got.

It still seems absurd that a game that cost me 10GBP should have copy 
protection when programs costing many times more do not. Also it is 
annoying that they should depart from technical standards to do it, 
because all that will happen is somebody will make non-standard 
equipment to beat it and eventually that will become the new de facto 
standard, and in the meantime many people will be confused about things 
that sometimes work and sometimes don't for no obvious reason. As if 
technology wasn't confusing enough already.

Rod.

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