What do I need, some advice please

[reck]

Hi I'm after a way to create images of my games so I can play them without having to use the DVD/CD's all the time. I play a lot of games and don't want to spend time keep switching the DVD/CD's in and out my player. Now from what I understand Daemon tools allows me to mount CD/DVD images on system as long as they don't have copy protection. I'm assuming most of my games do so I guess I need something like Alcohol 52% is that correct? So a few questions.

1. What software do I need to create images of my games? If I buy Alcohol 52% do I need to use daemon tools as well, or does the Alcohol software mount the images on my system itself?

2. Is Alcohol able to backup all my games? Here a few games I've got to give you an idea. Battle for Middle earth 2, Fear, Doom 3 and I've just bought Supreme Commander so I would really like it to work with that.

3. I play Supreme Commander online, will creating an image of it on my system prevent me from playing online, I think the system checks that you are using a legal licence, disk (which I am). It uses SecureROM it that makes a difference.

4. Does this same software, Daemon tools & Alcohol, also allow me to do the same thing with Movies, i.e. watch them without having to get the DVD?

Thanks for any help with this guys, just started looking at this so I'm a bit of a newb.

[LogosEther]

Hey,

I'd get Alcohol 120%. It lets you create images of your games. It will also create images for DVD movies and such.
Then you just need to mount those images with Daemon, and your computer will think you've placed them in the cd tray.

This should work with copy-protected CDs. You can definitely mount the images, I know that... For certain copy protections you may need to get a Daemon add-on which is downloadable through this site. This is mostly for SecuROM copy protection.

[reck]

Hi LogosEther, thanks for the reply. So you reckon I should get Alcohol 120% then? So I can use that to create all the images of my games and then use dt to access them? Do you think Alcohol 120% would be able to create images of all the games I listed, I mean is a 100% cabable of imaging all games or is there certain copy protection is can't do?

Also what is this add-on called that you mention that I might need for certain copy protection?

Thanks for your help, anyone.

[FordPrefect]

1. Either use Alcohol 52% or Alcohol 120%. Depends on your needs. The only difference between them is that Alcohol 52% has no burning engine. (You can't burn CDs / DVDs only create images.). Alcohol has its own virtual drive ( which is afaik the same as Daemon Tools ) so you do not need Daemon Tools necessarily. You should checkout the trial versions of Alcohol. Btw. 52% is also available as a free edition, only limitation is a max. of 6 virtual drives.

2. The games you mentioned are no problem to backup - I have yet to discover the game which I cannot backup. Newer copy protection versions may need additional antiblacklisting tools though. (Like Yasu which is available here in the download section)

3. Playing online is no problem.

4. You cannot backup your movies with Alcohol but if you create an image of your movie with an appropriate program you can then mount it in DT / Alcohol.

[reck]

OK I downloaded the free version of Alcohol 52% to try it out. I inserted my Lord of the Rings: Battle for middle Earth 2 DVD and ran Alcohol, clicked the Image making wizard button and after figuring out why I couldn't see the Datatype dropdown to select the copy protection (found out it doesn't appear with DVD) I selected Data Position Measurement and set the precision to high. Then I picked somewhere to save the image and then it asked me to select a speed for the data position measurement. Not sure what I should select here so I left it on Maximum and off it went. Everything seemed to work ok and I mounted the image and then took the DVD out the drive and tried to play the game. I got the message I always get when I don't have the dvd in, "please insert your DVD and start again". So what did I do wrong? The only setting I can really alter is the speed so i'm going to change it to x1 and try again, guess thats going to take a long time.

So what do I need to do wrong? Do I need to figure out what sort of protection it's using, if so how do I tell Alcohol this as the dropdown doesn't appear for DVD's.

Thanks for your help.

[FordPrefect]

You also need an Antiblacklisting tools like Yasu or Curerom (don't know if Yasu works with Alcohols virtual drives). See download or curerom section here in the forum.
If it still doesn't work try different (slower) DPM-Extraction speeds.

[Jito463]

BFME2 should be Safedisc protected, not SecuROM. At least the CD version is. In which case, you don't need to extract DPM for the image. That might even explain why you can't make a working copy. Use ProtectionID to scan the main executable file for the exact version of the copy protection used.

[reck]

Hi guys. Well I did as FordPrefect suggested and downloaded Curerom and used that after I created the image and it now works without my DVD being in the drive, thanks. Jito463 I used ProtectionID to scan the main executable and it says no protection found but there must be some kind as it wont work without the DVD in the drive.

Ive just tried to backup my supreme commander dvd but it got stuck at 69% so Im going to try again at a slower speed to see if thats the problem.

[Jito463]

I scanned with ARay and it found 'Safedisc detected, version removed', so I can't be sure of the exact version used. But it's definitely Safedisc. In which case you don't need to worry about extracting DPM next time.

[psyreus]

SecuROM bypass

See my posts in the Afterlight thread for info on using A120 image every time...including Supreme Commander.