detail information

Nowadays, many data CDs, especially discs containing games, are protected by more or less effective copy protection systems. We're now going to examine which copy protections this drive can circumvent, and which ones it cannot (protections that are hard or currently impossible to circumvent with common software, such as CD-Cops and StarForce, are not looked at).

SafeDisc 2 / Weak Sector Test

Discs protected with SafeDisc 2 contain certain data that can be read, but that cannot be written correctly with lots of writers, or to be more precise, the data is actually written, but the way it is written does not allow to read it later. The data is usually refered to as "regular patterns". All weak sectors that have been encountered on SafeDisc 2 titles are made of such regular patterns, however, this is not necessary! It is very easy to create weak sectors from regular patterns though.

Different regular patterns have different "weakness", most of them are not weak at all. The patterns 3F65 and 7D65 are used on old SafeDisc 2 disc. That means, a writer must be able to handle these in order to backup SafeDisc 2.41 titles. SafeDisc 2.51.021 titles contain the 1212 and 14B9 pattern, in addition to the two mentioned above. That means, a writer must handle these as well in order to backup titles protected with SafeDisc 2.51.021 or newer. Patters such as 01B9, 7AB9, 659A and 04B9 have not been encountered on any SafeDisc 2 title, thus I had to create these ones on my own.

The following table summerizes which writer can handle which regular pattern:

	SafeDisc 2 old		SafeDisc 2.51.021+		really bad ones
	3F65	7D65	1212	14B9	7AB9	01B9	659A 04B9
Toshiba SD-R 5002							(?)	(?)
LiteOn LTR-52246S
LiteOn LTR-48125W
Plextor 4824A
Yamaha CRW-F1
Pioneer DVR-A05								-
Cyberdrive CW058D								-
	The written data could be read in a Toshiba drive (These drives are very sensitive towards badly written weak sectors)
	SafeDisc 2, up to 2.41 can be easily backuped. Higher versions either require AWS or fail at all
	SafeDisc 2 (incl. 2.51.021 and higher) can be backuped without AWS. However, there is the possibility that the drive might fail with future SafeDisc 2 versions, if new weak sectors are included.
	Drive can write all weak regular patterns in a way which allows reading them afterwards. It is unlikely that it will fail with any disc that relies on weak sectors as protection

As you can see, current LiteOn drives cannot write all regular patterns correctly. They are though able to backup SafeDisc 2.51.021+ and therefore get a sheep-score of .

Note that the number of sheep (in case of 1 or 2 sheep) does not indicate how many different weak patterns can be written or not, but it only indicates which weak patterns can be written or not.

Update 28/01/2003: The Toshiba SD-R 5002 has appearently passed the test once on a CD-RW, but there has also been one report about a failure. Further tests will be necessary.

Now let's see how fast this can be done. The title I will use is Star Trek - Bridge Commander, German version. It is protected by SafeDisc 2.60.

The Toshiba SD-M1502 DVD-ROM is the faster reader:

The LiteOn drives seem to have a weird issue with CloneCD: Even after the bad sector area has been read, the speed won't increase above 16x, although the disc spins at maximum speed. The speed increases to maximum as soon as the audio track starts (there is one audio track on Star Trek - Bridge Commander). This behaviour does not occur in Alcohol 120%.

SecuROM new: WarCraft 3

Older SecuROM *new* titles could easily be backuped by copying subchannel data. WarCraft 3 has a more advanced SecuROM version (not the latest one!), which requires a very good subchannel reader to get a perfect backup. The disc has been read with CloneCD:

This took 2 minutes and 3 seconds only. Writing took 2 minutes and 21 seconds:

The backup worked in the burner itself, but it failed in a Pioneer DVD-115! Lowering read speed didn't help. When using a Toshiba SD-M1502 as reader, the backup worked. So the new LiteOn drive is not a good subchannel reader for CloneCD.

SecuROM very new: Unreal Tournament 2003

When Neverwinternights, Patch 1.21 had been released, suddenly no backup of this game worked any longer. It was another new version of SecuROM, which uses physical parameters of the disc to verify originals. It took 3 whole months to find out how this works, and to find a workaround that can create backups the SecuROM loader accepts as original. This method is know as Twinpeak-method.

Unreal Tounament 2003 uses this copy protection, and now let's see if LiteOn 52x can backup this one, using Twinpeak. The idea of Twin sectors has been explained in our technical forum . They are used in the Tagé¨s copy protection, which had been considered uncopiable for quite some time. Now, the very same technique is used to beat a copy protection.

This is probably not entirely comprehensible to many users! Make sure that you have some time available if you want to learn how Twin sectors work and how they can be used to fool the SecuROM loader (and maybe also CD-Cops). At first, Blindwrite's BWA builder is used to create a BWA file:

Then, CloneCD is used to read the first CD of UT2003. This image is processed with twinpeak and written to CD using CloneCD. Since the image file is just a bit "unusual", but not "wrong", CloneCD is to keep size and TOC:

You can see that the image has been increased by 4 minutes: much more that what is necessary (the first twinpeak version, which had to be recompiled for each game, increased the images size for this game by less than 1 minute). Write speed is set to 52x, and a Plasmon CD-R is used:

The created backup runs in the LTR-52246S flawlessly, but fails in a Pioneer DVD-115. But whether a twinpeaked disc works or not on a drive depends mainly on the drive on which you want to play the disc. If a reader which cannot produced good BWA files is used, then the backup will probably run in no drive at all. It is by the way pure chance that writing of WarCraft 3 and Unreal Tournament 2003 took exactly the same time.

Bad Sector Test

This test is to determine how fast the drive can read and skip bad sectors. Therefore, I used a disc with as many bad sectors as possible, X - Beyond The Frontier. 157.000 sectors are bad. Intelligent bad sector scan is switched off. Number of retries is set to 0. First, the disc has been read in the LiteOn drive:

Then, as comparision, I've read it in my Toshiba SD-M1502. This drive has an incredibly fast error skip:

This table summerizes the read times of discs which contain bad sectors in a LiteOn LTR-52246, LTR-48125W and a Toshiba SD-M1502:

The LiteOn drive can skip a few bad sectors per second. While this is enough for SafeDisc 2, it leads to a very very long read time when reading discs such as X - Beyond the Frontier.

Conclusion

Reading protected data disc can be very slow if lots of bad sectors are present and the LiteOn-CloneCD-WarCraft3-issue has not been taken care of. Having another reader is recommended for protected data CDs.

Next up in our LiteOn LTR-52246S review, the reading of protected audio discs...

Write Quality

Protected Audio