How to create a Mini Image of SafeDisc Games This guide deals with the problem that many Internet Café has when installing a new game or program that requires the CD to be inserted into the CD-Player in order for the game or program to start. The requirement for this example is: • • •

A working and installed CD/DVD-Burner Alcohol 120% 1.9.5.28 (or later), can be downloaded from download.com A Battlefield 1942 CD

1. What is a Game Image, and why use it? A game image is a file that you can store on your hard drive or on the network, which is an exact copy of the CD/DVD you have in your CD/DVD player when you want to start the game in question. You can “mount” this file using a mount program such as Daemon Tools to simulate that you have a CD/DVD player with the game CD/DVD inserted into the CD/DVD player. This solution makes it unnecessary to have a CD/DVD player at all in your café computers, which will save a lot of money. Creating this image is not always very easy though, since every game that is sold in the stores today comes with a copy protection.

2. What is a Copy Protection? A copy protection is a part of the CD/DVD that checks if the image or CD/DVD is authentic. If the image is created using the wrong program and settings the game will not start even if the image is mounted in Daemon Tools, it will instead ask you for the correct CD/DVD. There are many different types of copy protection such as SafeDisc, Securom, StarForce and so on, each different copy protection also has a version number and is constantly updated to keep hackers from breaking the protection.

3. What is a Mini-image? When you are using game images instead of putting a CD/DVD into the CD/DVD player, you don’t really want to access the content of the CD/DVD, you only want to authenticate the CD/DVD so you can start the game. But when creating a full game image you also get all the unnecessary content which is 99% of the total space and with today’s games growing even bigger and bigger you will need a lot of hard drive space to be able to keep all the game images. The solution to this is a so called Mini image, which is just as it sounds like a miniature version of the actual CD/DVD, but it only contains the copy protection information and no content.

4. How Do I Create a Mini-image? In this example we are going to create a Mini image from Battlefield 1942, which is protected by SafeDisc. We are using a program called Alcohol 120% (version 1.9.5.28) which can be downloaded from download.com. When SafeDisc checks if the CD/DVD is authentic it basically checks for “bad sectors” in the start of the CD/DVD, if they are there then game is thought to be authentic and the game will start.

How to Create a Mini Image of SafeDisc Games

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4.1 Insert the Game CD/DVD in the CD/DVD Drive Insert the Battlefield 1942 CD 1 in the CD/DVD player

4.2 Launch Alcohol 120% Start the Alcohol 120% software from the Start Menu.

4.3 Start the “Image Making Wizard” In the top left corner, click the Image Making Wizard link (this text can also be the same language as you have set in your operating system, in Sweden for example it will say: Guide för imageskapning).

4.4 Change the Settings for the Burning Process Select which device the Battlefield 1942 CD is in, then change the Read Speed to 1X (150 KB/sec), and finally make sure that only the Skip reading errors checkbox is checked.

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4.5 Set the Name and Location of the Mini Image Choose where you want to save your Mini image and the name of the file, in this example it is saved on the Desktop under the name Battlefield_1942_Mini_Img. When you have done that, click Start to begin the creation of the image.

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4.6 Start Writing the Image File The game image will now start reading from the Battlefield 1942 CD for a few seconds and the start writing the image.

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4.7 Cancel the Process When the process starts to show Disc read error at: (2 or 3 is ideal), click the Cancel button.

4.8 Keep the Files It will then ask you if you want to cancel the process, click Yes at this point.

After that it will ask you if you want to delete the files, at this point click No!

You will now have 2 files on your desktop called Battlefield_1942_Mini_img.mds and Battlefield_1942_Mini_img.mdf, these are the files that you now can mount using Daemon Tools so that the game can start without a CD/DVD player at all. All copy protections work differently, so this method might not work on SecuRom or StarForce for instance. You can download Daemon Tools from www.daemon-tools.cc.

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