Game cafe need to run BattleFront with NO CD!!!!

[Vigilante]

Hey all, I just posted this on Alcohol's forum. See if any of you have any suggestions.


I used to use GamesXCopy but that has since left the main stream, and Alcohol seems to be the go-to-guy replacement.

I have downloaded the trial of 52% and I really like it. However, this is the situation, you've probably heard it before. I hope I'm posting in the right forum.

We have 6 games for our cafe that we are setting up. And getting emulation to work is a trick. But I managed to get all our games to work except Star Wars BattleFront and HL CounterStrike.

Here are my questions:

1. Based on what you know, how exactly should I set up Alcohol 52% to create an image of Battlefront? The disk is the normal retail version.

2. ClonyXXL detects the disk as "SecuROM *new*

3. A Ray Scanner detects it as "SecuROM 5.03.06.0041"

4. I created the image in Alcohol 52% trial (latest just downloaded today) with the data type set to "SecuRom *new (4.x/5.x)"

5. When the image is loaded and BattleFront is started, it gives this message:

"Conflict with Disc Emulator Software detected. See www.securom.com/emulation for more details".
I have searched for this error and information and have not found a good solution yet.

6. I do NOT need to burn this disk. The cafe client PCs have NO CD-ROMs at all. The software must run emulated.

7. I have also created a few other images but all give same error. I also opened the image with Daemon Tools and got same error.

The software I have and everything else is all legal. If Alcohol 52% works with each game then of course we'll buy that for each PC as well. So I need a legal way to do this. As in, no "cracks" or "hacks" that would be considered a no-no.

One thought I read online was that BF is simply blacklisting emulation software. Literally checking if it's installed and then failing because of it. If that's so, then I now hate Lucas Arts. And I have no problem "hacking" a file here or there to block its blacklist check. That would be an outrageous thing to do in my opinion. Cause a lot of cafe places with out-in-the-open PCs can't exactly have retail CDs sitting there where people can steal them. Nor do we want to buy 20 CD-ROMs just to play one game. It's silly.

So how do I emulate Battlefront?

Thanks.

 

[Vigilante]

Just in case anyone needs to do this same thing. Here is what I ended up doing.

Somewhere out there on the net is a so-called "no-CD" crack for Battlefront. As this was my only option, I had to try it. The strange part is, it didn't work for no-cd. Instead the game still wanted a CD in the drive. However, it now DID work with the emulated disk!
We tested the game as one-player, LAN, and Internet play and it worked on all three. So this hack didn't screw it all up, but it apparently removed the black-list.

In my opinion, this is perfectly fine. Because the idea of blacklisting is just bull-dog, strong arm, Microsoft tactics. Saying, "you can't use our software if someone else's software is installed". Shame on Lucas Arts.

There are a lot of perfectly legitimate reasons to use a CD-ROM emulator, and for one company to say you aren't allowed to have them, that's just wrong.

Still, there is a small chance that this is not the case. But I won't be buying any Lucas Arts games because of this.

So E-mail me if you need this file I'll tell you where.

Cheers