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Ok, I got the Safedisk patch for 1.16F about a week ago. Today, I received an email from a different tech guy and, on top of pointing out how tedious the system for "verifying" my copy of Civ3 would be (he didn't know that I have a legal copy of both the game and the patch), he also pointed out that Safedisk INTENTIONALLY CRASHES YOUR MACHINE IN CERTAIN CASES:
Ok, here's my situation. I work in a recording studio, and in doing so, have set up my computer for audio handling. This includes a few CD burning programs [none that are listed above] that ignore copy protection (professional CD burning utilities regularly do- copy protection is strictly a consumer-oriented scheme) such as Sound Forge's CD Architect.
So what this tells me is that safedisk is designed to *not* work with programs that ignore copy protection. This seems understandable, but it STILL urks me that a company forces me to "remove other software" before I can run it.
THE SOLUTION:
I have a program [Dynamo] on a CD that has two drilled holes in it. Literally. The holes guarantee that if you try to copy the CD, it will screw up your cd rom drive. It works insofar as I have not tried to copy the cd, and I have run the program without a hitch. Why can't more copy protection schemes be more like this?
My $.02
[edit: removed whiney overtones]
Quote from a tech support email:
Macrovision recently reported the following items as well.
If any of the following are on your computer system and even partly active, the game will exit at the splash screen:
[***or in my case, lock up the machine ***]
1. Daemon Tools
2. Insektors
3. Playback
4. Nero Burning Software
This is intentional and is written into Macrovision copy protection. If you have any of these programs, you will need to remove these programs before the game will run. There is no work around for this and we will NOT provide the patch to you in these cases. We also will not provide this patch to anyone running VMWare as SafeDisc is also incompatible with that software.
Macrovision recently reported the following items as well.
If any of the following are on your computer system and even partly active, the game will exit at the splash screen:
[***or in my case, lock up the machine ***]
1. Daemon Tools
2. Insektors
3. Playback
4. Nero Burning Software
This is intentional and is written into Macrovision copy protection. If you have any of these programs, you will need to remove these programs before the game will run. There is no work around for this and we will NOT provide the patch to you in these cases. We also will not provide this patch to anyone running VMWare as SafeDisc is also incompatible with that software.
So what this tells me is that safedisk is designed to *not* work with programs that ignore copy protection. This seems understandable, but it STILL urks me that a company forces me to "remove other software" before I can run it.
THE SOLUTION:
I have a program [Dynamo] on a CD that has two drilled holes in it. Literally. The holes guarantee that if you try to copy the CD, it will screw up your cd rom drive. It works insofar as I have not tried to copy the cd, and I have run the program without a hitch. Why can't more copy protection schemes be more like this?
My $.02
[edit: removed whiney overtones]