Safedisk 4.7 .TMP files theory?

[ArgonFire]

I was just playing around with making a MAXI image of my The Sims 2 Pets cd and thought I'd compare the 00000001.TMP and 00000002.TMP from the MAXI image posted on gcw (the one by poseden; that's multi-language. I used mdf2iso on my file so I could compare them without the protection being lost).

The 00000001.TMP is only a few bytes different between the US release and the multilanguage. 00000002.TMP is completely blank, and I remember reading something about how Safedisk worked... they wrote temporary files on the disc that told the duplicator where to place the protection. My guess is that the protection is in the 00000002.TMP file and that 00000001.TMP tells where to locate the sectors, so in effect the data from 00000002.TMP has just been moved in the duplication process (the original copy that goes to mastering is not a working copy because the data is still inside 00000002.TMP). Removing 00000001.TMP causes the image not to work.

So I played around with removing extra data in the MAXI image (like folders, uneeded file names, etc.; why does no one do this? The game only needs the two tmp files.) and low and behold, the file size of the 00000002.TMP file began to emmerge when compressed with Windows 2000/XP file compression ^___^

With my Sims example, you can use either the Multilanguage or the US MAXI image to run the game... the only difference between the two images is uncompressed files size (and the sectors where the protection is, when you strip everything). If someone could decipher the 00000001.TMP... couldn't we hack it to change the check for the size of the image? Useful for ***PERSONAL*** MAXI images or ***PERSONAL*** backup copies with updates already applied and the protection so they can be used like the original disc?