Alcohol rocks.
I don't drink.
What?
Alcohol 120% is a shareware program. One-time fee, unlimited use...you get updates for free.
It makes images of CD's. But not just ISO images, ripping the raw bits off music CD's, or anything like that. It makes an image of the CD as implemented, error blocks, "Data Position Measurement", and all.
That's what copy protection looks for. If you've ever been playing a sweet game, and then your CD-ROM suddenly spins up or down while the game pauses and wigs out, that's error blocks doing it to you. They put the error blocks in there on purpose, so the copy protection can look at their location on the disc and in so doing verify it's an authentic "intentionally broken" disc. "You've got a cheap CD-Rom drive!" you're made to believe, but really you have a drive that's doing the right thing...the others that don't spin down are the cheap ones, resulting in corrupted data reads, ignoring errors as "normal", so forth.
Errors aren't supposed to happen, when they do, discs slow down, they try harder to read that block, they retry several times. It's just not nice, and lots of people find they can't play games because the copy protection won't work with their drive.
Alcohol fixes that. But wait, that's not all.
I'm a 30 year old gamer, if I needed to find my CD for, say, Master of Orion 2, I'd be lost. It's in there, somewhere, in my long-term storage of literally hundreds of CD's, all in identical jewel cases, many without cover art (as, back in the day, they often only had fancy prints on top of the CD, not colorful jewel cases). But with Alcohol, now this is no longer an excercise in pain. That it also fixes copy protection just makes the whole thing work better.
Right so on to the explanation.
I have a home-made RAID array, 10 ST150176LC drives (Seagate 50GB SCSi LVD drives, in SCA form factor). That's 450GB for about ~200 (in five years ago prices). I samba share this to my retarded, I mean, Windows clients, and that's where Alcohol comes into the picture.
You make one of these images, measuring the position of the data on the disk, and finding all those error blocks and carefully recording them, and keep them on this giant RAID array. My games will survive my house burning down so long as I only lose one drive. Am I a little too attached? Maybe.
When you want to play, oh I dunno, Space Quest 7, you just click on the file, resting on the Samba share, neatly organized, and mount it on a virtual drive. The Alcohol software turns requests from applications to this virtual drive into reads from the images you've stored on disk.
Presto. Rapid, maximum speed reads all the time, and it never slows down for errors. You can play your favorite game on whatever computer you happen to be sitting in front of, and never have to hunt for the CD.
Remember to put your CD keys in text files next to the images to drive home the feeling of never having to know where your media is ever again.
That's how this old school gamer copes, anyway.
I don't drink.
What?
Alcohol 120% is a shareware program. One-time fee, unlimited use...you get updates for free.
It makes images of CD's. But not just ISO images, ripping the raw bits off music CD's, or anything like that. It makes an image of the CD as implemented, error blocks, "Data Position Measurement", and all.
That's what copy protection looks for. If you've ever been playing a sweet game, and then your CD-ROM suddenly spins up or down while the game pauses and wigs out, that's error blocks doing it to you. They put the error blocks in there on purpose, so the copy protection can look at their location on the disc and in so doing verify it's an authentic "intentionally broken" disc. "You've got a cheap CD-Rom drive!" you're made to believe, but really you have a drive that's doing the right thing...the others that don't spin down are the cheap ones, resulting in corrupted data reads, ignoring errors as "normal", so forth.
Errors aren't supposed to happen, when they do, discs slow down, they try harder to read that block, they retry several times. It's just not nice, and lots of people find they can't play games because the copy protection won't work with their drive.
Alcohol fixes that. But wait, that's not all.
I'm a 30 year old gamer, if I needed to find my CD for, say, Master of Orion 2, I'd be lost. It's in there, somewhere, in my long-term storage of literally hundreds of CD's, all in identical jewel cases, many without cover art (as, back in the day, they often only had fancy prints on top of the CD, not colorful jewel cases). But with Alcohol, now this is no longer an excercise in pain. That it also fixes copy protection just makes the whole thing work better.
Right so on to the explanation.
I have a home-made RAID array, 10 ST150176LC drives (Seagate 50GB SCSi LVD drives, in SCA form factor). That's 450GB for about ~200 (in five years ago prices). I samba share this to my retarded, I mean, Windows clients, and that's where Alcohol comes into the picture.
You make one of these images, measuring the position of the data on the disk, and finding all those error blocks and carefully recording them, and keep them on this giant RAID array. My games will survive my house burning down so long as I only lose one drive. Am I a little too attached? Maybe.
When you want to play, oh I dunno, Space Quest 7, you just click on the file, resting on the Samba share, neatly organized, and mount it on a virtual drive. The Alcohol software turns requests from applications to this virtual drive into reads from the images you've stored on disk.
Presto. Rapid, maximum speed reads all the time, and it never slows down for errors. You can play your favorite game on whatever computer you happen to be sitting in front of, and never have to hunt for the CD.
Remember to put your CD keys in text files next to the images to drive home the feeling of never having to know where your media is ever again.
That's how this old school gamer copes, anyway.
kreatinkaos:
Do you play Anarchy Online ?