I beg to differ. We do NOT need to crack these games, nor should we aspire to it. What we need is a method for the original game's code to verify that a legally CD is indeed in the drive.
totaly agree. but in order to do that, we need copyprotection ( like wineX or windows ) but doing that open source is NOT legal. even in my country.
In other words, we need to write code that, when used by the ORIGNAL copy protected software, will recognize copied CDs as copied and original CDs as original with similar false negatives to what the same code running on Windows does (if we have false positives, i.e. an original CD is mistook to be pirated, that is none of the copyright holder's beef with us).
the problem with copyprotection is, is that there license forbids anyone to distribute anything that gives away any hints on how to decrypt it.
and that is what open source code is all about.
so if we do it. it must be closed source ( i hate that ) else we will get seud by every closed source software programmer in the world.
Now, unlike the DeCSS case, where the code was AIMED at a similar purpose, but actually did something else, and unlike the elcomsoft case, where the actions performed by the program could be put to several uses, some bad and some good, in this case no copyright holder can take any beef with the final outcome. I see no reason for binary distributions to be available throughout the world, backwards places like the US included.
Personally, I don't think that anything can be said against the sources as well. This is nothing more than letting software that can use the Windows infrastructure to do non-standard things with the CD do the same non-standard things on Linux/*BSD/Solaris etc. The code itself need not contain anything relating to any copy protection technique at all.
tell me, how are you going to tell if a cd is real or fake without copy protection. if you really have a way to do this, please...... post it.
If anyone thinks that is not the case, and hosting of this code on the main WineHQ site is not desired, I am willing to host the code on my site, and also take responsibility over it's maintanance.
i think it is not the case. but if you now better, please tell
Mark Hannessen