-2
I have a couple of old video games—The Hobbit (2003), published by Vivendi, and Zapper: One Wicked Cricket (2002), published by Infogrames—which won't boot when mounted using a virtual drive, but they do boot using the game CD in a real drive (not all old games have this problem). I thought virtual drives were indistinguishable from virtual ones. How can I circumvent this? I have already tried changing the drive letters, but to no avail.
I use Windows XP SP3 32-bit. I used CloneCD to create the images and VirtualCloneDrive to mount them. I have also tried WinCDEmu.
EmielBoss
Posted 2018-06-13T19:24:55.120
Reputation: 27
2They were designed to prevent you doing that... otherwise all your friends would have a copy too. Circumventing that would be off-topic. – Tetsujin – 2018-06-13T19:27:58.883
1For what it's worth, I say YAY for those publishers. If it was easy to clone a protected CD, you'd be able to share it with people who did not pay for it. Perhaps you don't care, but when people steal software, it affects those of us who create such software. Not saying you're stealing it, since you can run it on the CD drive, but there's a reason it only runs on a CD drive. – Bill Hileman – 2018-06-13T19:30:03.287
well, except for SecureROM or Sony. burning out other peoples disk drives prematurely or installing rootkits on their boxes are unacceptable means to protect your imaginary property. – Frank Thomas – 2018-06-13T19:44:50.093
1It's abandonware. These are old games which aren't available digitally (and barely available physically apart from some second hand sites). Of course I understand the reasons publishers have as a business, and I totally respect those, but as these games aren't available anymore, and I would like to preserve them only for the sake of nostalgia (and without sharing them), I was just wondering whether this was possible with today's technology. I mean no harm, I just would like to be able to play these old games in the future. – EmielBoss – 2018-06-13T19:51:34.700
@EmielBoss Might be worth it to name the games. For all you know there could be someone out there who has figured out a way around it. For example, you can play old “Doom” maps on modern hardware and all you need is the data from the CD. The binary file is what is ancient. The data—if open sourced or reverse engineered—can then be used with a modern fan-made open source variant. – JakeGould – 2018-06-13T23:38:13.583
@EmielBoss They are still copyrighted. They still have DRM unless they have been republished at say GoG or Steam and received patches to remove the drm – Ramhound – 2018-06-13T23:41:37.533
@Ramhound All of the software available here is technically still copyrighted, but in many cases the hardware needed to run the software is long obsoletely. Thus, abandonware. Also, if you personally own a copy of—let’s say—a Doom CD the data files can still be used with modern ports of the core engine like those found here.
– JakeGould – 2018-06-13T23:45:41.673@Ramhound Also, copyright, copy protection and the ability for a purchaser or software to make their own backup copies for personal use have nothing to do with copyright. – JakeGould – 2018-06-13T23:46:39.350
“Digital rights management (DRM) is a set of access control technologies for restricting the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works.“ is the definition that Wikipedia provides to DRM. DRM is what would prevent the disk to be duplicated. I disagree with the notion, that copying the game disk, doesn’t have anything to do with copyrights. Exceptions existing to law, that make breaking the DRM illegal in a single country, doesn’t chnage the fact the material is copyrighted (which was my only point). The publisher would still be required to remove the DRM (has happened many times) – Ramhound – 2018-06-13T23:48:48.867