Interesting news on Pirates! and loading issues people have

[crabber338]

Well I'e been hearing about loading issues that people are having around these parts, and especially in the Atari Technial forums. I found that I too start experiecing these problem today, although I had no problems yesterday. Well I recalled that i set my Plextor DVD drive to 'silent mode' last night to watch a movie and I didn't change it back. Sure enough, when I changed it back to maximum, the game was able to load.

Now, it also has to be known that i am sure that most LE DVD owners are probably experiencing a somewhat 'long' loading time. It seems like the game is scanning the DVD over and over again. I believe that there are SERIOUS issues with the protection scheme that has been employed (sometimes it wouldn't even load, but it works fine after trying again). For contrast, I recently got a crack that disables DVD/CD authentication and the game loads instantly. I can only imagine that the pirated (no pun intended) versions of this game run just as flawlessly as it does now. Isn't that sad? My perfectly legit and registered version runs like crap, and a crack makes it run like it should? Anyway, if anyone is having problems they should make sure their drives haven't defaulted to 'slower' read speeds. If they continue having problems, perhaps Atari Techsupport can provide them with a convenient link to the crack LOL

[BlueDEvil]

CD with build-in copy protection is always difficult to read by most cd-drives. This is usually occur in combo drives. Sometimes autorun takes forever to work. This happen to many other games as well.

[bryce777]

[Microwavegerbil]

That certainly is true, I used to have an Artec CD-R/W and it never really worked right. My current one is a Samsung and it's a beauty, I think Plextor and newer Lite-Ons are pretty good too.

Pirates! uses SecuROM copy protection, just as NWN and I think most Atari games do. It presses a certain contour into the spiral track on a CD and makes the game impossible to perfectly copy because you can't replicate that contour. I'm no expert, but the files used to check to make sure you're not using a burned CD slow down your load times in many cases and cause problems for the people that have legitimate copies of the games.

The kicker to this is, of course, the fact that you can download no-CD cracks and greatly increase your load times.

[pleary]

The copy protection started telling me that I didn't have the original disc in the drive, which is dull

Help!!!