How to make LEGAL copy of Chessmaster

[acrafton]

I recently switched my primary travel machine to a Macbook and purchased the Mac version of Chessmaster which has an annoying 'feature' - it requires you to have the cd in the drive when you play it and the CD is copy protected so the bundled mac stuff doesn't work. This bugs me for a variety of reasons but mainly because I lose things and don't want to lose a 40 cd on the road. Is there a way to make a copy of this and create a disk image of it so I can just mount that image and not have to travel with the CD? On my old PC I had VirtualClone drive which did the job nicely but don't know of a Mac equivalent. .?

Again, this is for a LEGAL backup of software I purchased, not stealing.

Thanks
Adam

 

[NATO]

Unfortunately I don't have an answer for you, but this drives me up the wall as well... I would love to be able to fire up Chessmaster randomly when out and about but can't because I don't carry the DVD around all the time. It annoys me no end.

 

[zero2dash]

I don't know if this will work or not, but it's a shot.

Put in the disk.
Open Disk Utility from the Applications -> Utilities folder.
In Disk Utility, click on the cd, then click "New Image" and save it to your desktop. I'd name it the same thing as the label of the cd.

Doing so should make a disk image of that cd and all it's contents, and the game may see that image and interpret it as the actual cd.

This worked for me before on an old Quark install where the installer needed a floppy disk but Macs nowadays don't have a floppy drive, so I used an old beige G3 to extract the disk contents, transferred over network to the G5, then used Disk Utility to make a 1.44 meg disk image with the [requested] floppy files, and Quark saw the image as the floppy and installed.

It's worth a shot at least.

Good luck.

 

[Eric5h5]

I don't know if this will work or not

It almost certainly won't work...games these days actually check for the physical presence of a disk. So disk images are useless. Yes, it's annoying. Yes, I have complained about it elsewhere....

--Eric

 

[Chone]

It almost certainly won't work...games these days actually check for the physical presence of a disk. So disk images are useless. Yes, it's annoying. Yes, I have complained about it elsewhere....

--Eric

Civilization IV also requires a physical disc in. I haven't played many Mac games recently but all games except Civ IV have worked with a disc image (I use Roxio). It really is annoying because I don't want to get my CDs thrashed and then when I get nostalgic years later and want to play the game again the CD is unusable, this happened to me with my Warcraft II CD and ever since I try to make images for my games. My Starcraft CD also got a few scratches and skipped whenever someone spoke on the campaign and crashed on Protoss 2 mission in Brood War, thankfully, I had a trusty disc image backup

Try a Chessmaster crack (if there is one) or an actual physical copy of the disc.

 

[Counterfit]

I just love it when companies prevent you from exercising your legal right to a backup.

 

[Eric5h5]

I completely understand the desire to combat piracy, but making it annoying for legit customers isn't really the ideal solution. The good news is that, with games moving toward online distribution, this problem should eventually go away....

--Eric

 

[charmin]

Try a Chessmaster crack (if there is one) or an actual physical copy of the disc.

Tsk tsk tsk.

Try emailing Feral, rather than fruitlessly trying to make a 'legal' copy of the disc. Surely everyone on these forums knows that a crack is never legal? If it was legal, it wouldn't be called a crack...

 

[zero2dash]

Tsk tsk tsk.

Try emailing Feral, rather than fruitlessly trying to make a 'legal' copy of the disc. Surely everyone on these forums knows that a crack is never legal? If it was legal, it wouldn't be called a crack...

Given the circumstances & problem at hand - him using a crack or a backup is not illegal.

 

[charmin]

I completely understand the desire to combat piracy, but making it annoying for legit customers isn't really the ideal solution. The good news is that, with games moving toward online distribution, this problem should eventually go away....

--Eric

This pretty much summed up the whole thing. Publishers HAVE to protect the discs. Usually, the people who moan about "preventing customers from exercising their legal right to a backup" aren't exercising anything legal.

With the popularity of the intarwebs these days, it's easier to move to online activation style anti-piracy systems, which are both more effective and convenient than the traditional SafeDisc/Securom/etc. style methods.

Like I said, if you contact the publisher you'd likely get a better answer than any speculation on here.

For argument's sake, here's the copyright text around my XIII disc (also published by Feral):

"Software © Ubi Soft Entertainment, All Rights Reserved. Published for the Macintosh by Feral Interactive Ltd. Unauthorised copying, reproduction, rental, public performance or broadcast of this game is a violation of applicable laws. [some other boring stuff]"

 

[2ndPath]

This pretty much summed up the whole thing. Publishers HAVE to protect the discs. Usually, the people who moan about "preventing customers from exercising their legal right to a backup" aren't exercising anything legal.

The real problem here is that people who buy the product will have a more limited version than those people loading the cracked version from the net. This is the case for protected disks as well as for software with DRM protection. So the paying customer has to suffer more than the not paying ones.

 

[charmin]

Paying customers receive support and free updates.

AFAIK, most cracks stop working once you apply a patch, and if there's a problem with the game, the publisher probably isn't the best person to email and whine at:

"omg, I totally downloaded this from h4x.com and it won't work."

Without rules there can be no freedom, etc.

 

[SilentPanda]

Dungeon Siege gave me a similar problem. A loooong time ago a forumer sent me this and it worked. If you have Toast, you might give it a try.

I copied this straight from my e-mail copy I saved. Of course switch out Dungeon Siege stuff for Chessmaster stuff. This may also work with newer versions of Toast.

Here is a link to the original post although instructions were sent to me via e-mail and copied below.

------------------------

Okay, here's the skinny... the following is assuming you installed Toast 6 Titanium into your /Applications folder.

- From Finder, navigate to /Applications/Utilities and start Terminal.app
- I installed Toast 6 Titanium into my Applications folder, so my directions will reflect this
- in Terminal, execute the following command:
$ cd /Applications/Roxio\ Toast\ 6\ Titanium/Toast\ 6\ Titanium.app/Contents/MacOS
(Note: you will have to escape the spaces, which I have done above, so you ought to be able to copy and paste)
- now execute the following:
$ sudo ./TDIXSupport ./TDIXController.kext/
(Note: you will have to provide your administrator password)
- now execute the following:
$ ./ToastImageMounter ~/Documents/Dungeon\ Siege\ Disk\ 2.toast -readonly -hybrid
- you should see the disk image show up on the desktop and in the Finder, and looking like an actual CD icon instead of the "usual" drive image
- At this point you should be able to run Dungeon Siege.

Now you would think you could simply unmount normally from the Finder, but that's not the case. Doing so will result in the icon going away, but efforts to remount using the above commands will do nothing. Instead, you will have to manually eject the disk image when you are dong playing.

- from Terminal
$ hdiutil eject disk2

This assumes that the image ended up mounted as disk2. If not, you will have to figure out the appropriate disk number. You can do so with

$ ls /dev

and looking for disk# entries where # is any number. Presumably it will be the highest numbered disk# entry

And that's pretty much it.

PS - For some reason, the disk doesn't mount properly when you try to use the menu option from within Toast 6 to mount toast images. I read up on the help docs for disk copying and it says it doesn't copy copy protected portions of cd's. I'm guessing it might but tries to avoid mounting them unless you do it manually like this.

 

[Carrot007]

I completely understand the desire to combat piracy, but making it annoying for legit customers isn't really the ideal solution. The good news is that, with games moving toward online distribution, this problem should eventually go away....

--Eric

To be replaced by a wose problem.

Why should I require an active net connection to play my games?

What happens when the company has gone bust and I can no longer activate it when I need to reinstall.

Basically online distribution that has any sort of protection for the makers in it will just be an even bigger annoiance to the user.

 

[charmin]

Are any of the people condemning software protection schemes actually suggesting that publishers release their software completely devoid of protection?

"Here's a game. There's no reason you should pay for it, unless you want us to eat, so please do, but we won't hold you to it."

 

[Eric5h5]

Are any of the people condemning software protection schemes actually suggesting that publishers release their software completely devoid of protection?

Sure...productivity software rarely has any physical copy protection. The industry went through that whole thing (years ago), but the inconvenience to customers was too much and it was abandoned. Of course, games are rather different in that they have a limited shelf-life by comparison. But in my experience, the people who moan about "preventing customers from exercising their legal right to a backup" are almost always legit...the pirates aren't moaning about anything, because they've all downloaded the cracks and are happily playing without the DVD. It's annoying, because those of us who are doing the right thing and buying the games are getting inconvenienced and the pirates aren't.

--Eric

 

[theBB]

For argument's sake, here's the copyright text around my XIII disc (also published by Feral):

"Software © Ubi Soft Entertainment, All Rights Reserved. Published for the Macintosh by Feral Interactive Ltd. Unauthorised copying, reproduction, rental, public performance or broadcast of this game is a violation of applicable laws. [some other boring stuff]"

Sorry, just because they write something does not make it legally binding. The customer either purchases a license to play or buy an actual physical product. In the former case, you have every right for backups as long as no more than one person uses the program at any given time on the prescribed number of machines. In the latter case, you would not be allowed to make a copy, just like you are not allowed to reverse engineer your TV or cell phone to build similar products. Let's say they go with the latter type of sale contract. However, this would make them subject to product liability, which software developers prefer to avoid. They cannot pick and choose which type of business rules they are subject to.

In any case, every piece of software or DVD worth having gets cracked soon and goes on sale for a few dollars in the Far East or become free to download. Those who don't mind "stealing" gets it through these avenues, so the paying customer gets left with these annoying issues. Anybody who believes this makes business sense needs get his head out of the sand.