My apologies to all of you in a state of euphoria, but certainly you are not creating 1:1 backups. As an indication, try installing your backup from a Plextor 2410 or Toshiba 1612. Apparently these drives, and others perhaps, fail to read these twin parts (they will still authenticate though). Now, judging from some posts, the twinpeaks method can be adjusted to not produce errors on those drives, so perhaps this problem will be cured soon.

However, there is still a difference between the original and the backup. "Why should I care, when I can install and play?" you may wonder? Well, there has been quite a lot of gloating towards Sony in the recent posts here. I was musing too, as to how the people, who designed this protection would feel right now. (Aside: I was also wondering, if they ever "communicated" with Tages to stop them from spreading that protection because it holds a key to beating securom4.)

Anyway, if I were in their shoes, I would already have a team set up, which uses the strategy to defeat tages in order to create an additional check for twin sectors. I know too little about twin sectors for any valid statement, but assume the next patch for UT2003 or whatever has a modified version of securom4. This modified version will first check for geometry and then check for twin sectors. If they succeed creating this, you all can trash your backups.

Sorry again for raining on your parade...

Every solution to a protection is temporary. Let us have our moment in the sun.

Come to think of it. What prevents Alcohol, Clone, or Blindwrite from enabling a funtion similar to "Hide CDR" that hides twin sectors? Just thinking out loud.

Granted I may have missed a couple of posts, but I failed to find ANY claiming that these copies were 1:1....

Also, the idea that Sony would ask Tages to "stop spreading that protection" is absolutely laughable. Like Tages gives a crap if SecuRom is being "defeated". Matter of fact, the more "ineffective" SecuRom seems the more likely that Tages will be able to sell their protection (which from what I understand is a little pricy and why not too many games include it [see problem below]).

And of course, they can always get their crack group of protection experts to come up with updated versions of SecuRom. That is, until the cost of SecuRom development drives the cost of putting it on cd's so far up that virtually no one will buy it...

Well, when I said "communicated", I was thinking about communication on green rectangular paper, if you get me?

If they have a price so high as to sell nothing, one start to wonder why they keep it. After all, their product was doing the trick... Still they didn't sell it much at all. I am not saying that Sony must be bribing them, but it wouldn't surprise me, if they stopped Tages from spreading by some means. They must have been developing this secu4 for some time.

Regarding 1:1, that was the goal, that most posts here persued. If one has a drive which reads twin sectors, one could easily believe that this is in fact a 1:1 Copy. I just caution people not to create too many backups and rely upon them. Until Securom 4, a working backup was rather reliable once it worked.

I get ya! I get ya! "The green slips"

I was reading my post over and it sounds kinda hostile, which it was not meant be. We are all in the same boat here.

As far as Tages being "pricy", that's just what I've heard . I have no proof of this being so. But you gotta wonder: if it's so good, why doesn't everyone use it?

And you're right, Sony probably will find a way to stop Tages distribution or minimize it or even maybe get them to change their scheme some how. Companies with that much money usually get their way...Then again, why not just by the darn rights...