Some remarks about "successful" copies of UT2003

Burning Software
#1

Hi,

I’m a very active “reader” of this forums, maybe not a very actice “poster” but i think I know what I’m talking about. Especialy because I’m in a very “busy” e-mail contact with venom386, who you all should know by now.

In this forum some people claim to have made a working 1:1 copy of UT2003 and some other people call the frist ones fakers, liars or even worse because they think it’s impossible to do a 1:1 copy of UT2003.

To calm things down a little bit just the following:

There is no reason to accuse anybody of lying because they MAY have had success in copying UT2003, just read this quote from venom386’s posting (sticky in CloneCD forum):

Even if your copy works by accident from CD-R or usual image - this is because of bugs in protection. It shouldn’t!!

So its possible that some weired (or even not so weired) hard- and software constelations confuse the Securom protection, so that the check does not work correctly. Believe me, this protection does some very weired things to test the cd, to blacklist DT and to protect itself against disassembling.

But its only an accident when a 1:1 copy works, the only proven way to play UT2003 without original cd (apart from using a no-cd cracked exe) is an image with a “enhanced” MDS file and the latest beta of Daemon Tools (which is not available to the public till now). This way it works, i’ve tested it !!!

So calm down everybody and wait a little bit till venom386 comes with a new surprise!

Sloopy_DE

#2

Thank you for the information Sloopy_DE :slight_smile: We just have to patient!

#3

I just posted this on another thread, I think this proves how
unpredictable and buggy this protection is:

In one of my PCs, I have a Mitsumi 52x cdrom. I installed UT2003 in this system from the original discs, when I try to play the game and I put the original CD1 in and I get the SAME results
as my failed backups. The CDicon comes up and it spins for a while, the cd light shows activity and then does nothing. On 2 other PCs (Liteon LTD 163D), the orignal CD1 works.

I read in the UT2003 forums that there are some users out there where their CDrom drives can’t read the original. This adds further proof to the theory how “buggy” the new securom is.

#4

I have also noticed that some of my friends can’t play even with the original CDs. As VeNoM386 wrote earlier, the new protection checks some of the characteristics of the CDs. What if some of the CDs are not “exactly” as the new SecuROM protection is expecting? In this case also it will fail the check. This could be another reason (besides CD readers) that even the original CDs won’t work in some cases.

Just my 2 cents.

#5

Thanks for the info Sloopy_DE, I guess its time to think outside the square to solve this problem, unfortunatly this seems more like a third party program that intercepts the .exes call and sends the reply (which is what the secureROM wants to see)