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It's not about making the clone of the cd, it's about the piracy prevention built into the system itself.

For context, it used to be very common in the early days of disc consoles. Playstation 1 had some, let's say vulnerabilities. But Sony and Microsoft quickly patched it and it's been borderline impossible since. Though I'm sure someone has cracked the code if you look deep enough.........

Copy protection is a wide industry that specializes in doing just that. There's hundreds of different ways of achieving it, so you'll have to look up specific consoles or even specific games to learn more.

In the case of your CoD dvd, the disk doesn't even contain the game, but only some information to take you to the download page and maybe an activation code.

Basically they include A) hidden and/or B) bad information that your average reader/write will A) not see (and therefore not duplicate) and/or B) "fix" when writing it.

When the console attempts to play the game it will A) notice that the hidden information isn't there and/or B) see that the "bad" information has been "fixed" and then not run the game.

You'd have to have a custom/proprietary reader to correctly read those parts in order to write them correctly.

Yup, I think the bad information is what the PlayStation ones use. Basically CDROM/DVD specs include a lot or error checking (like 8n10b encoding). The intent is that scratches will remove some data, and it's usually not enough to impact anything.

Sony exploited this, they put intentional low level damage in the data. Damage that any standards compliant drive would assume is a simple scratch and correct. And in fact, the vast majority were unable of doing otherwise as they had dedicated chips for making these corrections. Sony then just searched the disk for specific, predefined errors, and they could do it because they had custom chips that reported the errors. And they were able to say if the disk wasn't damaged in the right spots then it wasn't legit.

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