The developer of DEAMON Tools has posted information on our forum regarding the latest SecuROM versions. The developer of DEAMON Tools goes by the name VeNoM386, and you can consider him as important as our beloved Olli, developer of CloneCD. Because also VeNoM386 has to do a lot of research for copy protections as he has to understand them in able to emulate/beat them.
He says that it's currently impossible to copy some of the latest games and describes why. He also is pretty clear about 1:1 backups. It seems that also correct EFM encoding and RAW DAO capabilities are getting less important. The solution seems to be emulation and DEAMON Tools seems to be a doing a good job on this, you can even help!
I just passed by in this forum and couldn't resist smile after reading your discussions and explantions. Here is REAL explanation of what is new Securom: |
Latest version of Securom CANNOT be copied on usual media just like other protections of this style (CDCOPS etc.). PERIOD. Forget about 1:1 copy in a traditional way! The glass master used to produce original SecuROM disc has unsteady physical parameters along the spiral track containing data sectors. Securom loader verifies these parameters and checks that they are indeed changing along the track which is not the case on your '1:1' copy. You cannot copy it on usual media because usual CD-R/RW has consistant chacteristics all over the disc (track pitch etc) and its parameters are different than parameters of the master.
It is the same as trying to duplicate $100 note on usual paper - you must have special paper.
Maybe some day new media will appear that will allow to change their characteristics on-the-fly, but not now - so forget about the days when you made 1:1 backups, you will have to use either cracks or emulation. Even if your copy works by accident from CD-R or usual image - this is because of bugs in protection. It shouldn't!!
DAEMON Tools provides emulation of new Securom by means of additional information in image file that is needed to describe parameters of original media. The only image format that currently allows such information is MDS (but it does not mean it has this info - it is optional). We have provided prepared MDS files for some new Securom games on our site, because no today's dumping program currently is capable to add this info to MDS file automatically - this info was extracted by kind people from original CDs with my own internal tool and added manually to MDS.
If you are sure your game is new Securom and it does not work from virtual drive - contact me for information how to make modified MDS. We can then place it on our site so everybody can use it. Please don't forget to specify the version of game (language), because different versions may have different image sizes.
The original post can be found in this thread. This post has been made in our Optical Storage Technical Discussions Forum, where several people try to reveal the secrets of optical storage related technologies.
There are also many discussion about this subject in our CloneCD Forum, but for now also CloneCD doesn't seem to be the solution. We just all have to wait till new software is released that will emulate this protection or till we can buy this special media (or cracks, but we don't want to use them, that's the trick!)
More information and the download of DEAMON Tools can be found here. For those who don't know this software: DEAMON Tools is able to mount images of CDs and treat them like they are in your CD-ROM drive (it's a virtual CD-ROM device). It is also able to emulate data to feed to protections like the latest SecuROM.
Source: CD Freaks Forum
