Is it technically possible to...

Share a cd/dvd drive over a network? If you can share a harddrive you can share a cd/dvd drive right? and if it is possible do companies disable this for games so you have to buy a $100 game for each player? and if thats true can I bypass it?

Thanks in advance to whoever can answer it. If it isn't possible then thanks in advance to whoever can give me financial grief counseling (if theres such thing).

You can share any drive over a network to my knowledge, whether or not the CD copyright will work over it is dependent on the copyright in question.

If yer trying to play a game multiplayer over a LAN, most games just need CD for startup verification, then the CD isnt needed at all, so you can just swap it around after having loaded the game up.

Ok :) so do most companies actually enforce it or just say "please don't do this it isn't fair however theres nothing stopping you" like they do in the music industry?

Erm.. Should questions about software piracy ( which is what cheating copy protection amounts to ) really be on BRL's forum?

It's not really software piracy though if you've already bought the game. I don't see why you should have to buy a game more than once. Do you buy a DVD for each DVD player in your house or do you swap it between machines?

Back in the day, I use to routinely play network Space Hulk on my 2 Win98 PCs after sharing the CD drive to both machines. (After 1 PC's CD drive @#!*ed up)
It ran almost surprisingly flawlessly, with little or no speed difference from running on one machine. SO it's certainly possible. Whether or not it works as well in XP I dunno, I would doubt it to be honest.

Yes it is possible to lock a game down to a particular system. A key is generated contains information that is specific to that computer, the hardware-key. If you attempt to run that application on a computer with a key that does not match the game will fail.

Because that's what they're selling for the price they're asking. It would be different if they tried to cheat you, but they're quite clear that you need one copy per player. We don't get to pick which laws/rules/etc we obey and which we don't.

I agree that it's unreasonable to license a game such that you have to buy one copy per player, but that doesn't mean it's ok to pirate it. It means if you don't like the license they're selling, then you don't buy it.

I mean, I don't think it's reasonable to charge me £30 for a game and then £10 a month to play it, but I don't defraud Blizzard and play World of Warcraft without paying my monthly charges. I just don't buy it.




That's a false analogy unless you know a good way of getting that DVD to play on each DVD player *simultaneously* ;)

> That's a false analogy unless you know a good way of
> getting that DVD to play on each DVD player
> *simultaneously* ;)

Well I see your point, but this is not really the case because one than more person can watch a DVD, not more than one person can play a game. You wouldn't need to watch DVDs in seperate rooms, you'd just sit in the same room.

If a game wouldn't let me play it on 2 machines. I'd download a patch or crack to allow me too.

While you can share a CD/DVD drive so its contents can be read by another computer over the network, it will show up as a network share and not a CD/DVD drive.

Any game that checks the source of the data can see that it comes from a network share, and can choose to prevent it from running. Many (most?) commercial games nowadays have some kind of media protection built in (Starforce, Securom, Laserlock, RPMS, or others) which will flat-out refuse to run unless the actual original CD media is present in your optical drive.

Some games allow you to play a LAN game on two computers with the same serial after inserting the CD upon starting the game first, but not an online game.

So... bottom line, is that it completely depends on what the publishing companies allows you to do. Some companies are more lenient than others.

All?

the internet is a network of computers, why not hit a link to the CD image and a crack to use it? After all, doing this with your home network is the same thing... only faster.

It is piracy, in the same way that downloading the crack and image off a site is.

You wouldn't do that to get a second copy to play with, why would it be acceptable to do it some other way? It all ends with the same result. You playing a copy of the game that you don't have the right to play.

Well personally I think its a load of crap if I have to pay another $100 for each extra player. The most annoying situation for this is things like counterstrike on xbox that deliberately have one person per screen. Thats why good companies like bungie make it 4 per screen :)

100$ what game are you talking about for a PC that costs that much?

and it might be BS but did you ever stop to think that without the price the game might not exist for you to play at all? Games cost money to make, and they cost money to by to recover that cost, fund the next set of games, and have some sort of gain for the people who made it all happen.

Maybe they should have included multi-player with 1 disk support, but they didn't, likely for a reason.

Technically you didn't have to pay for the game at all, why follow moral code and law one way only to not follow them later?

DampeS8N, a helluva lot of games cost $100 or more once they go through currency and 12.5% tax. I'm not willing to pay again if a friend happens to come around for a coffee and a 30 minute game. Thats just retarded.

then don't play the game....

you have a choice...

moral bankruptcy or financial bankruptcy