On Mon, 2005-05-02 at 03:39 +1000, Greg Sharp wrote: > Another > thing that makes my son's disk unique is he bought it off some guy overseas > who had it for sale in an overseas games forum. When it arrived it wasn't > even an original but instead a burnt copy. So without meaning to my son had > bought a piece of Warez (illegal copy) but at least it did work. But somehow > I don't think this is related to your problem.
It will, in fact, be utterly central to the problem. The program will be trying to do special tricks to check if the CD is authentic, ie not a burnt copy. The copy you have will be "cracked" - the game binary will have been modified to skip this check. That authenticity check will almost certainly use nasty low-level hacks, direct hardware access, or other ickyness. Most of them do. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't work in Classic - thus your copy running when legit copies do not. I pointed out that this was probably the problem quite some time ago. This is one of the many reasons copy protection only hurts legitimate users - abusers get around it trivially. Crack the game if you can find a crack, and your legally purchased copy will cease preventing you from running it because it thinks you've stolen it. -- Craig Ringer
