[gameprogrammer] Re: Enough, already!


On 23 Jul 2007, at 7:36 AM, Jake Briggs wrote:




Grant Hallman wrote:
The issue here is that a lot of copy protection uses and checks for "damaged" sectors on the cd, which are "fixed" buy naive cd copying software - the same software that does bit-for-bit copying.
Yes, hence my wish. Real bit-by-bit does not "fix" things, it puts every byte on the same track and sector as original. Seems pretty basic functionality to me.
Yeah I am pretty sure that it doesn't really work like that. If the byte can't be read because its damaged (either with a scratch or on purpose), then how are you going to write it to another cd? Its the fact that those particular sectors can't be read, or have specific errors, that make the copy protection work.
Yea, copy protection have dirty bytes here and here, and when the CD/ DVD rom firmware returns an error, this is a go for the application. Once, I had a samsung "super drive" (you can read/burn nearly everything, from CD to double layer DVD, including RAM and other fancy things), and I was unable to play nearly all games with copy protection. I notified both samsung and a couple of editors, samsung told me they were using a double firmware, with some hardware cache, and that one was catching the error (actually, it was not a techie who told me that, and to be honest, I'd love more technical details, because not notifying the OS about broken sectors seems quite strange to me). Editors told me nothing, because I was unable to get someone not telling me to reinstall windows or something stupid.
Finaly, samsung gave me a firmware patch and everything is working again on that machine. But I was scandalized, not by what happened to me, but more by what the whole thing was meaning. I mean, how I am going to play in a couple of years if samsung idea was not stupid and everything that spin a CD act the same way? As a programmer, I doubt it, but I felt a little bit violated in my hardware choice. I only use this comp to play and test my games, but I was really frustrated but the whole political thing. (sorry if I'm not clear, I'm not native english speaker)
I still think a bit of this discussion belongs to that mailing list, that bit is the "how do I protect my game" bit. 

Regards
--
Kuon

"Don't press that button."
http://goyman.com/
Blog: http://kuon.goyman.com/




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