Gibbonz wrote:The interesting thing is that in my DVD drive, the game must see it as if it were an original because the game runs, loads and seems happy with everything, yet sticking my backup disc in the CDRW drive it comes up saying please insert disc when you try run the game. This does not happen with the original disc.
Strange eh? - It's copied well enough it accepts it, but then it dont accept it if put in a cdrw... weird..
What's happening is that the program is checking to see if it is being run from recordable media, and refusing to run if it is. It does this by attempting to read the ATIP information on the disc. This makes for a very simple form of copy protection.
The CD-R copy works in your DVD-ROM drive and, if you had one, your CD-ROM drive, because they can't read the ATIP information, and thus can't identify the disc as a recordable. Why can't they? Because they never had any need to, and the designers didn't build in the capability.
However, your CD-RW drive can read the ATIP information. Why? Because it needs it for burning the media. Thus, it does return the ATIP information and the program can identify the disc as a recordable and refuse to run. The "Hide CDR Media" option dodecahedron mentioned intercepts the ATIP read commands sent to the CD-RW drive and prevents the information from being returned, turning the drive into a simulated CD-ROM in this respect.
The "Hide CDR Media" option is disabled in systems whose locale is set to the U.S., although there are workarounds. The easiest workaround in your case, as you have already found, is to play your backups through your DVD-ROM drive.
The "Hide CDR Media" option will interfere with programs such as CDR Identifier, SMART-BURN, etc. that read the ATIP information from discs, since it will prevent them from getting the information as well. Anyway, it ought to interfere with these types of programs if it works as advertised. But I can't verify since I don't own Clone CD, and I have a U.S. locale system anyway.
cfitz