[Bug 10190] SecuROM 7.27: Caesar IV Retail fails to recognize media on startup

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10190

Anastasius Focht  changed:

What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|NEW                         |RESOLVED
         Resolution|                            |FIXED
            Summary|Caesar IV Retail fails to   |SecuROM 7.27: Caesar IV
                   |recognize media on startup  |Retail fails to recognize
                   |                            |media on startup
           Severity|minor                       |normal

--- Comment #21 from Anastasius Focht  2012-01-24 16:04:54 CST ---
Hello,

I bought the game for few bucks and looked into it ...

First, you need .NET 2.0 prerequisite (game launcher/registation will need it
later) -> 'winetricks -q dotnet20'.

The installation media change problem was bug 25963 and got fixed in Wine
1.3.36

The copy protection issue is partly bug 26459 (fixed by commit
http://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/commitdiff/b94fabfb5bfe9a19af22b9e28f7...)

--- snip ---
-=[ ProtectionID v0.6.4.0 JULY]=-
(c) 2003-2010 CDKiLLER & TippeX
Build 07/08/10-17:57:05
Ready...
Scanning -> Z:\home\focht.wine\drive_c\Program Files\Sierra\Caesar
IV\CaesarIV.exe
File Type : 32-Bit Exe (Subsystem : Win GUI / 2), Size : 12001280 (0B72000h)
Byte(s)
[File Heuristics] -> Flag : 00000000000000000000000000000011 (0x00000003)
[!] SecuROM Detected - Version 07.27.0009
[CompilerDetect] -> Visual C++ 8.0 (Visual Studio 2005)
- Scan Took : 1.989 Second(s)
--- snip ---

The original media is recognized in general but there are some cases where it
still fails.
The reason is there a high precision time measurement done during software and
optical drive interaction, called "data density measurement".

There is a set of locations spread over the disc which are read using pairs of
SCSI read commands (pass-through) per location from the drive.
You can watch them using +cdrom channel.
While the disc spins the time is measured it takes for the second command to
return (depends on the time it takes the disc to do a full round = depends on
the data density).
Combining all predefined locations a vendor specific pattern is formed and
verified.

Wine might not be able to reliably guarantee certain timing constrains.

If your disk fails to be recognized this helps:

- start wineserver and services prior (notepad/whatever in different terminal)
- wait a bit until the drive/media completely stopped spinning before start

Don't run any CPU intensive processes in background that cause workload spikes
during time measurement/calibration phase.

(still fails: try again)

Regards