How to Backup "No One Lives Forever"? Please Tell me!

[WildCat]

Hallo,

ich habe gehört, NOLF kann man nicht kopieren, und es hat beim ersten mal auch nicht funktioniert. Wieder ein Rohling ums Eck!
Hat jemand eine GENAUE Beschreibung, wie man eine Lauffährige Kopie macht?

Please Tell me how to create a workung backup of "NOLF German". I tryed, but failed with clone cd. i read some informations, that the new savedisk is not copyable. true?

[DeathBringer]

Not True check Game Copy World....Nero 5 works for it in RawDao So hopefully this helps
CloneCD worked to...Check the Database

[CaptainTrips]

Sorry no quite true. Not all writers can burn SD2 games. It depends only on the writer !!!! If you can't burn it with clonecd or blindread/write then you will not burn it with anything. Don't listen to people which claim something different. It is ALL bullshit >(. What reader/writer do you have ??? Ah and for all people who don't want to believe me:

copied from cloneclinic:
"The new copy protection..."
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As you know, there is a new copy protection, which can not always be copied with CloneCD. For example, you can find it on the CD "Command & Conquer - Red Alert2" and on some others as well. Let's call this protection SD2.

SD2 is a very interesting beast, as some of you already know. Sometimes a copy works only in the CD-Writer, sometimes not at all. Sometimes - depending on the writer used - in any CD-ROM.

Some people claim, that they had success with other burning software.

Let me explain, what the reason for all this might be. (I say "might be", as the information here is just revealed through observation, but I believe I am at least pretty close)

The first funny thing is, that if a SD2 copy doesn't play in a CD-ROM, this copy has additional bad sectors, which weren't on the original. As CloneCD reads and writes "as is!", I would have assumed, this is simply impossible.
So, if you are a curious guy, you can look at these sectors on the original CD (where they are readable).
You will find a lot of garbage on the first view. But if you run these sectors through a sector scrambler (a device, which is in every CD-ROM and CD-WRITER) you see the reason for all the trouble: Regular patterns like 'XYXYXYXYXY...' and so forth.

And this is exactly how the protection works. To understand this, you need to know, what the scrambler is used for (from ECMA-130, ISO/IEC 10149):

"A regular bit pattern fed into the EFM encoder can cause large values of the digital sum value in case the merging bits cannot reduce this value. The scrambler reduces this risk by converting the bits in byte 12 to 2351 of a Sector in a prediscribed way. ..."

The sectors I have mentioned above try in fact to overload the EFM encoder of the CD-Writer, because *AFTER* passing the scrambler the poor device has to write *REGULAR BIT PATTERNS* - something it really doesn't like.

After some quick tests, it seems, that some writers are affected by this problem more than others.

For example, writers based on Philips hardware (Philips, Fujitsu/Siemens, Acer, just to name a few) are NOT affected by this at all. With such a writer, you can copy SD2 with any CloneCD version, and the copy will run on every CD-ROM.

Most other writers will not write these sectors correctly. Some writers (Plextor) can at least read the copy they've made, so the copy will run in the writer, but not in an ordinary CD-ROM.

The reason for this might be, that the writer is able to position better, but this is just guess.

I must admit, this is a very, very cool protection: Something is on the original which can be read, and not be written. I really didn't believe such a protection is possible.