Copy protection

[Tim Schmidt]

On 10/6/06, Vincent Povirk <madewokherd+d41d at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/5/06, Tim Schmidt <timschmidt at gmail.com> wrote:
> > An application you are running (Application Name) is attempting to
> > access a disk in a potentially unsafe way.  Would you like it to
> > access a safe virtual disk instead?
> >
> > Yes  No
>
> A dialog like this would only serve to confuse people. If a setting is
> needed, it can default to the "safe" case. People who really know what
> they are doing (and therefore might want to use such an option) can
> modify the registry.

Works for me.  Assuming modification of the appropriate registry
setting is doable through winecfg.

> Is this really about having raw access to drive letters? If it is, the
> answer is simple: allow raw access if the drive letter has a device
> associated with it. If it doesn't (c: doesn't), then either don't
> allow it or simulate it. That easily covers both cases since copy
> protection would presumably work on c: and disk utilities would work
> with real disks.

Again, works for me.  I believe the only part missing for this case is
the simulation.  Of course, there's the added possibility that apps
will go mucking about with data other apps care about, in which case a
per-executable simulated device would be best.

> If it's really about what drives the program can see and not drive
> letters, then you need to store the information of which raw devices
> (/dev/hdX or an image file somewhere) the program sees independently
> of the drive letters. It sounds to me like it's more trouble than it's
> worth then to make disk utilities run in Wine. It doesn't seem to be
> something a lot of people want to do. It's not something they should
> want to do if it's with disks that they care about. And, well, virtual
> machines are much more suited to this than Wine is. So if copy
> protection wants to do things to physical hard disks rather than drive
> letters for some reason, I say simulate them and make copy protection
> happy.

Again, no arguments.  I just want to see apps work.

--tim