this is my first post... so may I say thank you very much for a really great forum...
I read a bunch today... as to become familiar with what is going on in "Today's" protection schemes.. being an old fart I am familiar with the old Commodore et al days and schemes, and familar with Mame et al...
I am not much of a gamer.. and I was surprised when I was able to just dump my Riven game in to my harddrive a few years ago..
Now Im into NFS Hot Pursuit 2 etc... after all my reading, could some one just correct my current understanding of protection.
(I have CloneCD in trial mode and I have NFSHP2 cloned and running but, not without what I perceive to be an emulator running, that is if you uncheck Hide CDR Media clone doesn't run).

Maybe my concept of what NFS cloned is doing when running,
and not running under unchecked HideCDR .... and emulation is the problem..

Basically to run something like NFS on a cloned disk an emulator must be running?

You can run a game like NFS without an emulator, if you have it on your harddrive running a virtual cd-rom?

I did read the thread about different burners not being able to burn correctly (philamber
http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread....threadid=50778) but I don't think discdump and burnatonce enables making a backup copy that runs without "emulation".. or does it?




Thanks so very much for your time group !
Jakesmydog

the "hide cdr media" option isn't some type of "emulation." inherent within the game's copy protection is a check to see if the cd the game is copied onto has an ATIP, which all cdrs do. "hide cdr media" will prevent programs from being able to check for the ATIP, circumventing this particular protection scheme. only cd-burners are capable of reading the ATIP, so if u play the game from a regular cd/dvd-rom drive, or from a virtual drive, the "hide cdr media" option isn't necessary.

Ryght... ryght..... makes a bunch of sense now..
I think I picked up the emulation business in all the
reading I was trying to catch up on the material. Im sure a bunch of people who are regulars read these posts...
so thanks again group.
Ill keep readin' !

Jakesmydog

NFSHP2 is sd 2.8 protected. It can be copied successfully with any 2 sheep efm writer with alcohol (safedisc 1 settings) or discdump (or clonecd with cue)/fireburner combination.

Discdump/burnatonce is hit or miss (mostly miss).

If you play from virtual drive or from ordinary cd/dvd rom, atip hiding utility not necessary. Atip hiding utility is necessary if run copy from writer though.

If your writer is not 2 sheep model, you can try alcohol, blindwrite, cd-mate, clonecd or gamejack with weak sector enhancement (various different names for same thing in different programs; e.g. AWS in ccd; Bypass efm error in alcohol).

If that doesn't work then can make emulation copy with either blindwrite with autoplay (blindwrite or stand-alone autoplay filter must be installed for copy to run) or clonecd (clonecd must be installed with hide cdr media enabled for copy to run: note that hide cdr media does more than just hide atip).