How Do you make Mini Images?

[prezpoonly]

Sorry, I'm new to this forum and also relatively a n00b at all this stuff, but could anyone let me know:

1) Does making a mini-image involve knowing programming languages, or can it be done with programs?

2) What's your general attitude to the usefulness of mini-images?

I recently got mini-images for a bunch of my games, such as Rome (forced to), the Sims2, and Call of Duty, and I thought that they were pretty useful. However, I read someone else post that they were 'lame', and I"m just interested in your guy's views.

Thanks for helping out a beginner.

[GLH]

To make mini-images, take a look here: Guide's, Tutorial's & Hint's (http://www.fileforums.com/showthread.php?t=54353)

[DarkLeftos]

To answer your first question, mini-images can be made two ways. You can make a full-image of the game using Alcohol 120% and then download Mini-Image Ripper. Second way is (and I prefer this one when creating my home-made mini-images) to load Alcohol, select the protection and 1x speed, and as soon as you notice Alcohol encounters Disk Read Errors, to cancel the procedure but NOT delete the files. This results in a nice mini-image, as the Table-of-Contents of the disk has already been written on the image.

To use the image, just mount it with Daemon Tools (left-click on the thunder icon and select Device 0; I still wonder why people always tell others to right-click on it... lol)

As for my opinion on the mini-image trend, well, I think the people that actually call them lame, are lame themselves. I believe they think that us who make those Mini-Images are lame, because we've supposedly made a crack without actually cracking the protection. Or they whine because they can't bother the loooooong time it takes to mount a mini-image.

While actually, the advantages are many. Cracks can be quite some MBs, while Mini-Images are (at least compressed) less than 1MB. And also, the main advantage is that they're version independent. You can patch the game without replacing exes back and forth, because you have altered no game-files in reality! And you don't need to download a new crack, because your mini-image is still a pure little image of your original CD, and it still works, as your original CD would work!

Well, that's my view on it...

[prezpoonly]

Yeah, first, I did read the forum rules which included the moderator is always correct...

However, Moderator's can be forgetful... The guide you pointed me towards only covers cds protected by Safedisc... Do you mean that that is the only type of protection that mini-images work with?

Strangely enough, when I had searched earlier for threads to do with mini-images, that one didn't come up.

[prezpoonly]

Thank you DarkLeftos for you pieces of knowledge. The thread GLH sent me to also described the method involving Alcohol that you just posted, but it stated that it was for Safedisc discs. Is that true?

Btw, the link to the mini-image maker doesn't work for me (but maybe that's because of my location)

[DarkLeftos]

It really works, well I have quite a collection of good home-made mini-images, and the first one I took the time to post here (Playboy the Mansion) was made the Alcohol way. It has Safedisc v4.

If you mean if it'll work for the rest of your games, it works most of the time (95%.) If you try this and you get no read errors at start, just stop it at about 0.5 to 1% of the ripping and try mounting it.

When you say that the MIR doesn't work for you, what do you mean?

[krondike]

You put up your nose.
And pray to god that the disc dosen't turn on to your.
You don't whan't a horny disc up your nose or dose you?
Than when the nose is reading the disc and make "digital" transfer to a space station called MiR, than the MiR transfer data to you, so you **** out a little brown substains, than you paste the/paint with substain on your harddriver, woppedo, than you got a mini version of your disc ON your harddriver.
Than you play the game without the disc up your nose or 'in' anything.

Okay before the moderators realy getting pissed of me I'm gonna tell the real thing, you might find this funny becuase of the story I told you, well you see.

There is a program called MiR.

Use alcohol to create a real 1:1 image of your original disc.

Test the image before you use MiR.

If the image are fine and the game start, run MiR and MiR do anything for you. It's create "the name".mir and the .mir file is a mini image of the big full sized image.

It's only contains the protection the disc had, not the real files. It's also keeping the file index as it was, there for you can see the file from the original image, BUT you can't copy, becuase there isn't on the mini-image. Just a the same index.