| I remember going through this journey of pirating software. Eventually, as software started to receive updates, keygens were more interesting as those things didn't break when an update was applied (or the update failed because a checksum mismatch of some exe / dll. For games, keygens and cracks were needed to bypass the original disc requirement. One could try to image the disc with Alcohol 120% which as able to retain the information needed to pass the disc checks. The output images were of the MDX [1] format. But those images were the size of your disc. So you had your installed game (e.g. 8.5GB) and now the image. Eventually some people were able to create a 'fixed' image of the disc. I don't know if it was just an MDX with pointers to nothing, or whether this had to be done on a game-by-game basis. I can't link to anything here but searching for 'no-cd fixed image' explains this better. You'd then mount those images with Alcohol 120% to play the game. Later on more detections popped up and I remember having to use Daemon Tools as it employed more sophisticated measures to hide it from the games. Also, I foolishly registered on Daemon Tools' website and to this day I get spam at daemontools@<mydomain>.<tld>... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Descriptor_File |