Introducing DiscCheckEmu (DCE)

[4d1xlaan]

That's sick actually

 

[Luca91]

Luca, I feel guilty for having been unable to do tests. My little work performance went into securing my computers and trying GrapheneOS on the only Pixel device in price range (4a).

Hey K!
Don't feel guilty at all Good luck with these interesting projects !

PhenoProtect crossed my path only once: On Carrera Grand Prix -- which I bought for that exact reason. Several hundred MB on the CD are intentionally bad sectors and it seems the protection checks for this on installing the game only (still a CD check present for starting the game).
Copying the CD is trivial though. It takes half an hour or so to quickly skip over the bad sectors with CloneCD or Alcohol 120% (with old Plextor drives Blindread should be able to dump the disc as if there weren't any bad sectors).

Yeah Carrera Grand Prix is actually the only known game that employ phenoProtect and you are right: the protection is actually triggered in the installer. The game is working in DCE on you copy a file from the disc, here is the DCEConfig file if you want to have a look.
When I'll have some free time (I've been so busy at work lately) I'd like to reverse engineer the installer to document how these bad sectors are actually checked by the DRM. This catches my interest.

I really have to kick myself into the butt and get to continuing tests. Your project is awesome and deserves more attention.

Haha thank you very much, but as I said, please no rush and take your time

That's sick actually

Thank you very much @4d1xlaan !

Post automatically merged: Saturday at 6:51 PM

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@KleinesSinchen I had some fun with phenoProtect today: I was able to completely bypass the DRM check (that take place during game installation) by manually extracting InstallShield cab files (using UniExtract v2) and using a debugger to just patch the registry apis and cd-check in the launcher.

Next time I'll try to decompile the installshield script and completely remove phenoProtect from the installer.

Quite a funny DRM, not a good one, but at least using some original ideas!

 

[Luca91]

@KleinesSinchen today I sucessfully patched the inx file, skipping the phenoProtect check from the installer. I'll wirte a technical paper about this, as it was an interesting adventure.

 

[KleinesSinchen]

Quite a funny DRM, not a good one, but at least using some original ideas!

That is what happens if somebody tries building DRM themselves… and has no idea what they are doing.

On the other side: If you want to do this:

I'll wirte a technical paper about this, as it was an interesting adventure.

It has to be better than the following example.
Of course everything below the line goes somewhat off-topic. But in the end I just want to bring in possible examples that might be possible to emulate at some point with DiscCheckEmu.
↓↓↓

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There is a children' TV series called Löwenzahn [en.wikipedia.org].
End of the 1990s, time of the "Interactive CD-ROMs" (often with QuickTime 3 → ). They produced a series of educational games(?) based on the educational TV series. From part 3 on they are "protected". Part 1 and 2 are just standard CDs. 3 and 4 have one of these custom bad sector ring protections. Nothing CloneCD couldn't handle back then already with default settings.
For the later parts I don't know exactly what they contain (I found only 1,2,3,4 on flea market).


I would love to link the source, but it would be linking piracy.
Somebody uploaded these things to the internet archive as standard ISO images, which will trigger an error screen when trying to start the game after installation (ccd/img or mds/mdf image would work). For Löwenzahn 7 there is an explanation how to get rid of the protection:

After installation, simply delete the file “optgraph.dll” from the installation directory. Usually under-> C:\Terzio\Löwenzahn7
...and off you go!

If that is true, this is some really high security copy protection.

Spoiler: Screenshots and photos

From my Windows XP computer ("Optical Drive Beast") with Plextor Premium, Rawdump compatible DVD-ROM and modern (SATA) DVD-RAM.

Trying to start Löwenzahn 3 without a CD gives a generic "Please insert CD" error


Here Löwenzahn 3 image is mounted by WinCDEmu, not by Alcohol 120%.


The simple emulator isn't good enough (that was my goal). To be honest it was pretty hard to trigger the protection since it is satisfied with pretty much everything else.

This CD is copy protected.
Please insert the original.

The program will end now.

No problems when mounted with Alcohol 120% or inserting a clone copy.



Hard to capture with camera, but the ring is visible on the outer part.


Last note: Think back to end of 1990s. HDD space was a concern and a full interactive CD-ROM with video and audio material usually didn't install all data. The installer only transfers a minimum to start the program and all data is loaded from CD on the fly.

 

[linuxares]

Will it support Starforce? :3

 

[KleinesSinchen]

Will it support Starforce? :3

Satisfying CD-COPS and StarForce requires accurate measurement of absolute data position.
Not even talking about the troublesome behavior of StarForce. For this infamous thing complete removal with a crack is the preferred method to make games compatible with newer Windows.