Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Technology

Keeping Children's Software on a Networked Server? 66

Posted by Cliff from the this-is-not-"piracy"....yet dept.
mache asks: "I have a seven year old son with his own Windows 98 machine and he has many, many educational and game CDs that his stupid parents have purchased for him. These CDs often get lost and scratched. Many of these applications will not operate without the CD being in the CD drive. At an average of $20 or more, I want to be able to load a CD on to a Linux server once and then access the application through Samba. I understand that there are some applications out there that provide a 'virutal' CD player interface to a remote server and may defeat the copy protection mechanisms (deliberately placed bad tracks) in place on kid/game/educational CDs. I bought the CDs legitimately and just want to use them legitimately rather than having my son destroy them, forcing me to buy him new ones. Does anyone have a recommendation for a Windows-based application that would produce a 'virutal' CD player on a Windows 98 machine and also defeat currently used CD copy protection allowing some sort of CD image to reside on my in-home networked server."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Keeping Children's Software on a Networked Server? More

Keeping Children's Software on a Networked Server?

Comments Filter:
  • Most Windows apps don't really need the CD in the drive. Usually it's a matter of the install disk location (which is usually the CD-ROM drive) that determines where the program looks. Simply copy the contents of the CD to a network directory and install from there.

    Keep a CD in the drive just in case the program is looking for something. A music CD works fine in most cases.

    • Not true anymore. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Chasing Amy ( 450778 ) <asdfijoaisdf@askdfjpasodf.com> on Friday June 14, 2002 @05:11AM (#3699786) Homepage
      That was true four or five years ago, but not today. There are many copy-protection mechanisms in place on contemporary CD-ROM games which really do require the CD to be inserted, such as SafeDisc, SafeDisc 2, LaserLok, and Securom.

      Fortunately, Daemon Tools defeats most forms of such CD-check copy protection, and new fixes are being incorporated all the time.

      http://www.daemon-tools.net/main.htm is the place to get Daemon Tools. It's a virtual CD-ROM drive which not only mounts CD images, it will also emulate the proper security mechanism that the origional CD would have.

      Anyone who wants to copy a copy-protected CD, or host CD images for a virtual CD-ROM drive, should read the tutorials on that site I referenced.
      • Well, that's particularly nasty.

        :-(

        Especially on children's educational software. You wouldn't think the low-volume piracy rates on those to be so high.
        • Low volume piracy rates???

          Have you been in an IT office around christmas...the fathers/mothers form a committe and buy everything once, then swap and copy and drip feed the releases to the children ;-)

        • Re:Not true anymore. (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Chasing Amy ( 450778 ) <asdfijoaisdf@askdfjpasodf.com> on Friday June 14, 2002 @07:23AM (#3700017) Homepage
          > Well, that's particularly nasty.

          It especially annoys me since I collect games, and eventually hope to be able to afford to build a home arcade machine containing a PC running all the games I've collected. Now, in that case I can't be inserting discs all the time; I'd want to run everything with no hassles from a nice custom interface for selecting games.

          [Incidentally, anyone interested in building home arcade PCs should check this site out, if they haven't already: http://www.arcadecontrols.speedhost.com/arcade.htm ]

          That means, of course, that I have to either make images for Daemon Tools of each CD and have them on the hard drive along with the installed game, effectively doubling the amount of hard drive space needed per game; or, find "cracks" for the game which let them run without the CD, from sites like GameCopyWorld, and crack each game the same way a pirate would.

          Which, of course, highlights a big flaw in the game copy protection scheme: it just doesn't work. People who want to pirate a game can simply upload a CD image, and then anyone can download and play it with Daemon Tools. Or, people who want to pirate a game can "crack" the game executable to not check for the CD, or just download a pre-made crack from one of the big sites, and then upload the installed game along with the crack and a registry file to transfer the needed registry settings, or make a simple custom installer for it before uploading.

          So, the game protection is effectively useless. People often say that the goal of copy protection is to prevent "casual" copying, like copying for a friend. In the case of a game, though, that's not going to be a big problem; the only thing it solves is people installing on multiple computers, but of course kids smart enough to be installing and sharing computer games are probably smart enough to find the cracks anyway.

          And of course, having to go out and find cracks for games I actually own has introduced me to all the best ways of getting games I don't own. So copy protection may actually *promote piracy* in the long run. I'll admit I've downloaded games I don't own. However, I never would have done so if I hadn't been introduced to piracy by the need to crack games I already owned.

          In the long run, the best thing is just to leave content unprotected--because anyone who wants to pirate it, will. Trying to prevent copying is a waste of resources, and in fact just pisses buyers off.

          Just my opinion...

          • Re:Not true anymore. (Score:3, Informative)

            by dougmc ( 70836 )
            ... effectively doubling the amount of hard drive space needed per game;
            So what? With 120GB drives on sale [p2ionline.com] at Fry's for $109 (the link is good as of 06/14/02, not sure how long it'll stay good), you can afford to do full installs AND include a disk image. Even if your game has 4 CD's at 700 MB each and takes 3 GB installed, that's only 1/20th of your disk -- about $6 worth for your $40

            Yes, it's obscene how large games are getting, and how much space they take. But then again, it's also obscene how large disks are getting and how cheap they are :)

            (And yes, these are 5400 RPM drives. So what? They can still do 20 MB/s quite easily. And yes, they're IDE, but for a computer for playing games, that's just fine.)

      • I gotta ask - are these crippled CDs still compliant with the appropriate CD specifications, or are they doing their own thing and counting on the public remaining ignorant and apathetic?

        Under the Fair Use rules established years ago, I have a right to an archival copy in case the original is destroyed, and no EULA can force me to "treat the original media as the archival disc for the purpose of compliance with Federal laws." If I buy a "CD-ROM," I expect to be able to make a usable archival copy at my own expense, and that includes burning it to a single CD or storing it in a collection of ISO images on a larger hard disk.
  • I think a seven year old should first learn respect for for the CDs. I mean education is the aim of the game. Letting them learn all these hi tech skills on the computer, should really include teaching him how to respect CDs and hardware etc.

    I think once he destroys his favourite disk, and learns that such behaviour means that one of his possessions is no longer available to him, then he will have learnt a lesson more useful to him than whatever the software itself is trying to teach.
    • The reason for the these games is learning. The alternative is casual play. If the child gets the Idea "I'll break all of my CD's, then I don't have to work on the computer anymore..." then the only alternative is some brain dead Hasbro game (or worse, she would want to use my PS2)

      I don't mean to brag (much) but my daughter already has the good looks that skipped her mom and my generation. (Sweetie, if you read this... I didn't mean it that way) I want my daughter to assist in developing a Linux kernel, or at the very least appreciate when the overthrow of MS happens. I want her to enjoy writing code, playing games, and take pride in her EIEE7E HAX0R-ism. Parenting is all about enabling a child to be self-sufficient. My goal is to teach my daughter to love her computer, and the more she plays with it, the more advanced topics I can get her understand.
      I don't want to curb her appetite to "break things"... I want to encourage it. That's want turns a good developer into great one. I want her to feel free to scratch the surface off of the CD to see what is on the other side.
      I will teach her to respect the rights of others (maybe), and I'll teach her that it costs money to replace things that break, and I'll teach her that daddy will not always pay for these things, but until she turns 5, I'm not going to teacher her to respect her CD's. Screw that! I'll make copies of them, or use the daemon-tools mentioned earlier to keep them safe for her.

      (There are not enough hot chick in the geek world. I submit we can't live in the MaTriX until hot chicks start writing good code-and like it!!!)

    • What about 3 and 5 year old skill level then? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Whilst I appreciate your willingness to comment on others' child rearing techniques, no doubt from your own vast experience as an educator and parent, I don't think you've addressed the question.

      My own children are 3 (as of two weeks ago) and 5 (soon to be six). Both are fond of computer games; the 3-year old plays "Elmo's Playhouse" (which is a superb educational tool - kudos to Children's Workshop!) and the 5-year old has been playing the Richard Scarry "Best Math" and "Best Reading" games for nearly two years now.

      I'm getting tired of replacing the Elmo CD, and I've had to replace the CD drive itself once already (and it's broken again now, but maybe I can glue it back together). I will try the Daemon tools and see how it goes.

      You do realize a children don't have fully developed fine motor control, right?
  • the only technology you need to solve this problem is a wooden paddle and a strong backhand.

    ;)
  • create ISO's from your favourite CD burning software and use Daemon-Tools to map that ISO over the network and you wont have any more problems

  • try (Score:4, Informative)

    by cassidyc ( 167044 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @04:43AM (#3699747)
    www.daemon-tools.net has tools for copying CDs and copes with safedisk protection

    CJC

    • Amen. I've been using Daemon Tools for exactly this purpose for almost a year now. I love it. The kids never need to search for the CDs and I don't have to worry about a favorite game getting scratched. I've been using it for my games, too, just because it's so much more convenient. (That, and my CDROM drive sounds like a jet engine warming up...)

  • Can you use mkisofs to copy them into an iso9660 image then mount 'em loopback, and share the mountpoints via samba?

    I did this with a primary school client of ours, but I have no idea how copy protection is these days - I don't really play games or use/recommend commercial software! :)

    • To copy a CD in an iso image under Linux it is enough to use dd(1) (dd if=/dev/cdrom of=filename.iso) or readcd(1) (should come with cdrecord) (and then mount them loopback): this is going to work also with some copy protected CDs, but not all of them.

  • Last month on this. I'm using it now, works great. Uses Samba and autofs to mount iso images on the fly. The only problem is that some installers won't work because it's not coming off a cd drive. Anyone know how to fix that? Thanks,

  • Did you buy or lease (Score:4, Funny)

    by ThePilgrim ( 456341 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @05:21AM (#3699799) Homepage
    As the EULA probably says you only leased the program, I'd return the faulty disk to the company with a stamped self addressed envalope and a writable CD and a covering letter to the effect that you would like them to copy onto the CD sufficent SW to be able to continue using their program.
  • "I have a seven year old son with his own Windows 98 machine and he has many, many educational and game CDs that his stupid parents have purchased for him...."

    It's early, no blood-level caffeine yet etc. but this gets me for some reason...can't put my finger on it quite, though.

    OK, getting the l'il unit involved with comps is great but ya gotta give yourselves some credit here.

    OT...why, sointley.

  • Daemon Tools (Score:5, Informative)

    by DiSKiLLeR ( 17651 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @06:23AM (#3699921) Homepage Journal
    There is a program called Daemon Tools [daemon-tools.com].

    It runs on Win95/98/ME, and NT4/W2K/XP.

    It'll mount .iso images, cdrwin, clonecd, and other cd and dvd images. It also emulates various cd copy protection schemes.

    Programs/apps/games think its a real CD in a real CD-Rom drive, because it installs a 'virtual SCSI card', and 'virtual SCSI CDrom/DVDrom'. Its as real as it can get. But the driver doesn't talk to actual physical hardware, it just talks to a file on your local or remote filesystem.

    So. Use CloneCD (or whatever, but clonecd is definitely best) and image all your kids' CDs onto the linux server. And use daemon tools to mount the cd images over samba.

    I hardly use any CDs anymore. I have literally 100s of CloneCD image's on my fileserver, and just mount them using Daemon-Tools over Samba.

    You will LOVE this program!

    D.

    • Re:Daemon Tools (Score:2, Insightful)

      by DiSKiLLeR ( 17651 )
      Ahhh crap.

      By the time i posted this comment, about 5 other people have posted about daemon-tools. I should just go back to my programming assignment and quit wasting time on slashdot. :)

      D.
    • From my experience to change CD's in Daemon tools you have to click on the tools icon, and select the image manually, and isn't there also a limit on 4 cd's at once?

      The question here is useablity for a 7year old. I can't really see that this is a major issue, but it isn't the most user friendly of tasks to do, popping cds into a tray and waiting for them to auto load - easy.
      • On their web site is a utility that will allow you to associate hotkeys with a disc image:
        Daemonmounter 1.01 [daemon-tools.net]
        A program allowing you to put keyboard shortcuts on up to 10 images. Just press your shortcut and the image will be mounted.
      • Actually, Daemon Tools supports commandline options, so you can create shortcuts that (using a batch file) automatically mount the required image:

        ---begin cdrun.bat---
        "c:\program files\d-tools\daemon.exe" -unmount 0
        "c:\program files\d-tools\daemon.exe" -mount 0,%1
        cd %2
        %3
        ---end cdrun.bat---

        Then create shortcuts to the batch file that supply
        image file, program directory and program name in that order, and you're set.

        (Lines 1 and 3 may not actually be needed)-- I haven't tested.
    • 1 problem with dameon tools over samba - just using the network neighbourhood daemons tools would crash (or was it crash my entire xp machine I forget now). You may need to have the samba location mapped to a windows drive but just finding it through network neighbuthood it not a good combination with daemon tools
  • Depending on how many CD-ROM games the little tyke has that are on the verge of destruction, and at the risk of sounding like an idiot, why not burn extra copies of the CD-ROMs? Burned copies are cheap, you can always just burn another one if the other one doesn't work due to scratches, etc... Also unless you have some type of massive CD-ROM rack sitting in a closet at home (which wouldn't surprise me coming from a /. reader) someone will have to swap the CD-ROMs out of the drive in the linux box. You are at work and your son wants to play a game but no one is around to swap the CD-ROM out of the linux box so he goes ahead and tries anyways. He either suceedes and drops the thing on the floor scratching it even more and leaving you with a really cool way to mount a scracthed CD-ROM over a cross platform network. The other possibility is he doesn't know to unmount the drive (unless you have autofs or something) and he tries to manually pull out the CD-ROM try from the drive, giving you more dammage. Yeah having a program create an image on the computer from a remote source or even from the computer its self is nice, but I think its too much and has too much that could go wrong with it. Okay, I'm done....

  • Crack the progam (Score:3, Interesting)

    by chrestomanci ( 558400 ) <david@@@chrestomanci...org> on Friday June 14, 2002 @07:18AM (#3700008)

    As I have said before in a previous post [slashdot.org], If you have legitimately purchased the software, and the copy protection is causing you problems, you are IMHO, perfectly entitled to crack the copy protection.

    There are essentially two ways to crack the program. (besides just making a CDR copy).

    1. Search the web or usenet for a crack, produced by one of the many cracking organisations. This usually works well for teenage games, especially those popular at LAN parties. I don't know if it will work for educational stuff interned for kids.

    A google search for "<program name> no-cd crack" should produce results, but be prepared for many annoying pop-ups, pornographic banners, broken links etc.

    2. Alternatively you could crack it yourself, as this is often quite easy if you have programming skills.

    The usual approach is to run the program under a debugger, tracing the program as it starts up with & without the key disc present. The just patch the executable so that the check is not performed, or the result ignored.

    Needless to say, you should only apply such techniques to programs you own, and you should not share the results with anyone who does not also own a legit copy of the software.

    • I don't agree with your comment, chrestomanci. If you legitimately purchased the software, then at the time of purchase, your perceived value of the software (copyprotection included) was greater than the price of the software. Otherwise you wouldn't have purchased it.

      After the fact, perhaps the copy protection lessoned the value of the product for you, but that gives you no perfectly entitled right to crack it. Cracking it is illegal under the DMCA and whether you agree or not, it's a federal offense. You are, however, perfectly entitled to attempt to take back the game, to never buy any game with said copy protection again, or most likely, to reasses the copy protection scheme into your perceived value of the next game that you assess. This is a benefit of Capitalism.

      • No. You are allowed to make a backup copy of your media. With some of the copy-protection schemes, how is that possible for the average-joe user?? If it takes a crack to be able to copy your media, then so be it. The DMCA and the feds can go to hell if they want to enforce that. It is your right to make a backup for archival purposes - period.
        • Even more to the point, it is legal to make any copy if needed to *use* the program. So just take your CD-ROM out of the windows box, and, tada, you have to copy it to the Linux machine to use it.
    • I've bought or been given several games legitimately that would not work on my system until cracked. (The Wheel of Time was one, don't remember the other offhand) I was able to install them, but then as soon as I attempted to run the game it would crash with some memory error or another. A quick visit to www.gamecopyworld.com [gamecopyworld.com] to download the latest updates and a cd crack and I was up and fragging in no time.

  • deamon (Score:1, Redundant)

    by BloodyLemming ( 244431 )
    works great in windoze. linux has some good options too.
    http://www.daemon-tools.com/
    http://www.iso classics.com/howto.html

    and for linux
    http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/CDServer-HOWTO/in dex.htm l
  • I forget what they're called, but I've seen some tools at the store that advertise their ability to remove scratches by sanding down the CD.
    • Yeah, i actully bought one of those POS tools they use before and all it did for me was leave about 100 more semi-circular scratches on the cd. Wonderful, $15 bucks down the drain and an even more scratched cd.
  • I found the daemon tools suggest wonderful - but
    if it's Mac software? Does anyone sell or have
    utilities for that platform???

    • Re:what about Macs (Score:2, Informative)

      by jmenezes ( 100986 )
      On a Mac, you can actually just load up a disk image onto the desktop and it will run.
      I've run several games this way, much faster then being on the cd drive.
      Apple's own disk image will do the trick.
      In OS X, im not sure if thats still the way to do it, but its always worked for me and my little brothers games under MacOS 7+
      • The thing is - I'd like to do this with a Linux server - which has the much larger drive, etc.
        I've tried it a couple different ways and haven't had any success so far.

        Anyone else have any clues?

        • If you are running OS 10.1 you can mount a Samba share running on the Linux server and run it just like another drive on your Mac, I don't see why you couldn't copy the *.img file to the Samba drive and then mount it from there.

          If you are running OS 9.2 or earlier then I think you have to buy an app like PC-Mac Lan,(which can then contact the Samba box like it was a Windows machine) though there might be Free alternatives.

          Another alternative could be to activate Appletalk in the Linux Kernel and use whatever tools are available to create a file share that way, though I don't have any experience with that.

  • VMware can spoof a CD drive (Score:3, Informative)

    by Thing 1 ( 178996 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @12:33PM (#3701968) Journal
    I have used CloneCD or Undisker to create an .ISO image, and then mounted that as a CD drive in a virtual machine under VMware [vmware.com] .

    Yes, it's a bit more work, and the daemon-tools that everyone's mentioning look nice, but TMTOWTDI, and for me one of the other ways is with VMware.

    The other benefit being, if you set it up right, the critter will have his own "sandbox" and can blown up the VM but it's really easy to back up the VM's directory, so when s/he does take the machine down, you can bring it back in a couple minutes of copying, rather than a couple hours of reinstalling.

    The drawback? Fast games won't be.

  • You could check out GameCopyWorld [gamecopyworld.com] and see if your games are listed. While its main purpose may seem to be questionable, it is nice to be able to install your games without having to hunt through your CD wallet each time you want to play.

  • I use CDspace (Score:3, Informative)

    by Polo ( 30659 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @01:43PM (#3702598) Homepage
    I've used CDSpace for quite a while and really really like it.

    Look at http://www.cdspace.com [cdspace.com] to find it.

    It's not free, but it's inexpensive. It has worked on EVERY game I've ever bought. You just scan an image into a disk file and then you can just mount the file.

    If you're setting up your kid's machine, I'd probably mount the files locally. Also, for minimum hassle, I would create a whole bunch
    of drives, one for each application so you don't have to switch files.
  • OK it was actually early 1995...I was working at Microsoft on an "interactive television" project (one of many such that Microsoft has attempted over the years).

    The system would have a set-top box running some Microsoft OS, connected to servers, using an IP network laid over the cable lines (basically like what cable modems do today, except it would only connect to the cable headend, not the Internet beyond).

    We wanted to let users run CD-ROM games on the set-top box with the actual CD images on the central computer. So somebody investigated how easy this was to do. Now we are probably talking about a beta of Windows 95 on the client and these are old CD-ROMs conforming to the "MPC" spec. Anyway the guy discovered that most of these games stored the drive letter of the CD-ROM in the win.ini or somesuch place (what would be the registry these days) and if you simply copied the CD-ROM to a network share, mapped that network share to a local drive letter, and changed win.ini, many of them would still work. But some didn't.

    Now that was a long time ago and who knows if it would still work (although some of the childrens CDs probably date from that era). Also this is the days of 1X CD-ROMs doing 150 kilobytes/second, which was reasonable to expect to achieve on a 10 megabit/second ethernet. Nowadays with a 100 megabit/second ethernet in yor house, you might get the performance of about a 24X CD-ROM drive (which will probably be fine).

    May not be the most useful info but it reminded me of that story so I wanted to share.

    - adam

  • I worked at a school district that had one of these setup, for the same purpose.

    Zerver [4tape.com]

    It had a CDROM so you could 'rip' CD's right from the tower.
    • I worked at a school district that had one of these setup, for the same purpose. It had a CDROM so you could 'rip' CD's right from the tower.

      What are the legal implications of something like this?
  • As has been mentioned before, Daemon Tools [daemon-tools.com] is probably what you're looking for.

    Daemon Tools allows you to mount a 1 to 1 copy of a CD (an ISO image, not a file copy) as a virtual CD. It also emulates most (if not all) of the current "copy protection" schemes in use.

    Note that you must keep the ISO around if you want to continue to use the CD. With the files ranging in size from 50 or so Meg to 700 Meg or more, this can quickly eat up space. With disk prices being as cheap as they are, this isn't as big of a problem as it was in years past.

    You'll also need a good duplication package for that 1 to 1 copy mentioned above. I have had very limited success with Adaptec's Easy CD Creator and no success at all with Veritas' CD Pro software.

    The one package I've yet to have a problem with is CloneCD [clonecd.net]. This product also seems to be able to copy most "copy protected" discs with the schemes intact on the duplicate; a nice bonus.

    Daemon Tools is fairly intuitive for the stuff it's doing and it's also the only software I've used that loaded a Windows VXD and didn't require a reboot after doing it. It is not, however, 4-year-old intuitive, so you'll probably have to either mount the ISO images as separate drive letters or mount them for your kid yourself.

    Hope that helps.

    • Second'ing CloneCD... (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I've used CloneCD too. Never had any problems. It very nicely duplicates all the copy-protection bits as well as the actual data... Works wonders for making backup copies of games and such.

      In constrast to my cdrom drives, which corrupt the data as it's read off the "copy-protected" discs about 50% of the time, rendering the software unusable. (Had to create a non-copy-protected "correct" disk to install the software, and a second "copy-protection-enabled" disk to actually use the software. Does anyone else besides me think it's nuts that these "copy-protection" systems require me to make TWO copies before I can even run the software?)
  • Lots of pretty good ideas here. I do this for an elementary school. Some of the older educational software intended to be used as 1 cdrom per workstation can work over a network just fine. Either copy it to an app server, or use a cdrom tower. Newer titles are harder. Sometimes there's an init file on your windows workstation(I forget; i'm at home) that sets cdrom to "d". You can change this to another mapped drive. In my experience, you'll have to use 3-4 different methods, and tinker a little bit, but you'll get it eventually. Personally, I don't handle cdroms properly all the time, so It's hard to expect kids to do so. And yes, you could burn yourself extra copies for the inevitable scratched/broke cdrom
  • I know this may be too late to get read, but oh well...

    One of my coworkers has two sons, about two and four, and he's in the same situation. His solution was to put all of their game CDs into caddies and get an old caddy-loading SCSI CD drive for their computer.

    It's still not perfect protection, but it certainly stops most of the casual scratching and such.

    --saint

Slashdot Top Deals

An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know.

Close