Flutterby™! : CD Copy Protection

Back in the day we used to have more fun figuring out the latest copy protection scheme on the Apple II and Comodore 64. The games were boring by comparison...

I guess modern gaming is going the same way, or at least the game creators are think so. I was helping my neighbor straightent out her computers. She's a lawyer and has two computers downstairs in her office for work and the kids have separate computers upstairs. Of course, mom's computers are faster and they used the better machines to play The Sims and all kinds of other games. As many of you know, letting your child go crazy installing games on your computer is a good way to get to see the BSOD more reliably. So I spent an afternoon wiping the machines and installing from scratch - with the advice of keeping the kids off the downstairs computers and buy them a big new one for Xmas (for a law office, the two machines downstairs were plenty fast enough).

So I start helping the girls get The Sims installed and offer to make a copy of their disc because it was very scratchy and hard to read (or so I thought). So I try to show the girls how easy it is to make a copy of those precious original CDs that have to be used to play the game. After a few hours, I was steaming. And did some research. Evidently the game industry has forgotten the lessons of the 80s and have started making out-of-spec CDs to flaunt copying the games (even for legitimate resons). A little bit of searching turned up Alcohol 120%. It figures out the copy protection scheme used and makes a copy with the appropriate problems. Of course, it took a little over eight hours to copy one CD... But that's beside the point!