Some games companies don't seem to mind at all that their copy protection causes problems with some CDROM drives. Notably, SafeDisc and LaserLok both make the more intelligent CDROM drives (e.g Plextor scsi) say "Hey this disc is faulty, let's go at 1x speed". Took about an hour to install Championship Manager 3 because of this, and half the time movies in other games (e.g Descent 3, MechWarrior 3) don't run properly because the drive is running slow.

The stupid thing is that this still doesn't stop you copying the disc! It just takes about 4 hours while the firmware in your reader tries to make sense of all the bad data. And then you can make a duplicate with all the bad data in the right place...

The audio cd market is much more picky when it comes to compatability. CDs are supposed to just WORK. It's feasible that a hapless record company will start using this protection, only to find out that the consumer will be pissed off. And besides, as pointed out, I'm pretty sure some of the better CDROM/CDR drives will still be able to read them. I suppose they probably haven't asked themselves whether the inconvenience factor to pirates actually makes it worth the inconvenience factor to legitimate users. On the track record of games companies, they probably don't understand this.



- John.

(The above may not represent the views of empeg :)