[21:27:39 PM] Smarte signs found
[21:27:44 PM] Smarte detected -> G:\Age of Empires III\age3.exe
[21:27:53 PM] --- File(s) Scan Finished [8.72s] ---

Thanks to A-Ray Scanner for that.

Just use Alcohol to make an Image (General Protected CD). Mount that with Daemon Tools and you are good to go. I tried both my AOpen 1648pro and my NEC 3520A to make the image and both drives produced a working image. It's possible that lower quality CD readers won't make sufficiently accurate images and the game will do strange things part way through (ie fading to black, color distortion). I have played the whole game, all campaigns, with the image from my AOpen 1648pro without a problem. I hope MS uses SmartE from now on .

I'll report back with backup copy success/non-success.

Thanks for letting us know. I hope, too, MS use SmartE from now on. This kind of copy-protection will thwart casual pirates using Nero and such, but will let the more interested in backing their games up users, do their back ups. "Professional" pirates will find their way to produce a copy anyway, either with a "cracked" exe or something else.

IMO, microsoft just used smarte as a cheap way to protect cd's. The real protection is the CD-Key which doesnt allow u to play online. There is nothing you can do about this, and undoubtedly many fans of the game will have to buy the game in order to play online.

While using alcohol to read aoe 3 and had bunch of reading error messages eventhough I checked skip error. I aborted copying. Are you doing anything different?

Reading errors are normal, they are a part of the copy protection. Be patient and wait till the reading process is finished, after burn the image.

Thanks. Guys! It worked. I guess I did not have patience to wait long enough. Once again Thanks!!!!!