[finleyville]

Hey everyone,

I just got a game for my birthday and I want to make a duplicate of it. Since I travel ALOT, I would keep the copy with my notebook and keep the original at home. I tried using the pre-bundled Adaptec Easy CD creator software and got error messages while reading the source CD. I understand companies wanting to protect their product against piracy. It just would be nice to make a copy for myself. Any ideas anyone?

Another question on a similar note, while burning CD's sometimes I see the error 'buffer overrun.' What does this mean and how can I stop it?

 

[raymondlin]

That's the whole point of today's games, you can't make a "straight" copy. Not against people like you but against people who want to sell illegal copies of the game. Unless you know what you are doing (as in what file in the CD to remove when coping), take the original with you.

 

[lini]

What you need is something like CloneCD (www.elby.ch) and an appropriate burner with RAW-support. Alternatively www.gamecopyworld.com is a good place to find copying instructions and patches for a load of games.

Buffer underruns or overruns happen, when the cache buffer of the burner is not refillied in time, so there's a break in the data stream. It usually happens, when the computer is too slow for the chosen burn speed, has too many tasks running during the burn process or is badly configured. Modern burners include systems like Burn Proof to prevent this buffer problems, though.

Greetings from Munich!

Manfred / lini

 

[andrzejpw]

I use cloneCD. I'm convinced that it can do anything. Also, for SafeDisc2 protected stuff, I have a program for that. . . I strip it from the disc image.

 

[lini]

andrzejpw: Cool, man! As far as I know, elby doesn't have many customers in the U.S., yet. But I have to tell you, that there are some new copy protections, CloneCD can't cope with (they are working on that, though). You should hear my friend Mike talking about all the nifty things, they already have to do - it's really funny. He's one of the developers, so I've got some insight there...

Greetings From Munich!

Manfred / lini

 

[andrzejpw]

yeah, I hear yah.

From what I've heard, the new safedisc versions are VERY hard to copy. . . Tell your friend that I love his program!

 

[grinch]

yeah, clonecd is awesome. i've tried a few things over the years and it always works great. i also use it for super-easy copying of audio cds with cd-extras on them. just read it once, then burn it. very simple.

your cd-burning problem is a popular one. one so popular that companies had to invent a dumb buffer ******** setting that could very easily corrupt data, but we don't care about that just as long as it doesn't say "buffer-underrun" and we can print that on the box.

if you turn off other programs in use and have a good cache setting you should be fine. personally, my new burner just came on friday and it is soo damn sweet. the buffer crap hasn't kicked in once though.. maybe it has something to do with the 768mb of ram my box has. anyway, i'd recommend exact audio copy for burning audio cds and for data, nero works pretty well. first thing i do when i install nero is go into the memory settings and set it to the max: 80mb! most people can't really set it this high, but i love it and it makes for a coaster-less operation.

the reason why you had problems reading the source cd is because of one of many ways the copy-protections work: invalid tocs, unreadable sectors, etc.