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One of the most annoying things about being a legitimate purchaser of PC games is copy protection. We fill our hard drive with gigabytes of game data, and yet still we have to dig out the original CD or DVD and have it in the drive before we can play something we payed money for. This annoyance is spared for pirates, they get a hacked version without what are lovingly known as CD or DVD checks.

Basically, when you launch a copy protected game, it will have some mechanism (of which there are many variants) to detect if your game disk is original or not, and only then let you play it. This is fine if you only own one game, or only play one game until you complete it before trying another, or your game disk doesn't get scratched too much from leaving it out of a case balanced on your desk because you got fed up with leaning up to the top shelf where you keep your game boxes every time you want to change your poison.

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Which leads us nicely on to Slysoft's interesting utility called Game Jackal Pro, which is designed to remove this chore completely and allow you to play any copy protected PC game without having the original disk in the machine. Now, yes, there are other commercial utilities like Alcohol 120% and Daemon Tools which will let you make an image of your original disk (protection and all), then mount it on a virtual drive, but the snag here is you end up with more optical drives than you might otherwise want (your original one, and your virtual one).

Another problem with Alcohol 120% and Daemon Tools is publishers hatred of such products, which can be used to play a copy of a game you never actually bought. So copy-protection mechanisms these days also go a long way in the constant battle against piracy, up to the point of refusing to load at all if these two utilities are installed. Which leads to companies on both sides constantly updating software to beat the other.

Meanwhile, Game Jackal Pro is sneaking around under the radar quietly letting you play your genuinely installed originals, without having to have a virtual drive at all. Which is nice isn't it!

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We thought we'd test the software with a particularly problematic title, Bioshock. For us, this has consistently been troublesome with Windows 7 64 bit and virtual drive software, and this is with the original disk inserted. Part of the problem is whilst there are plenty of legitimate reasons for having virtual drive utilities like Daemon Tools and Alcohol 120% on your PC, some copy protection schemes treat them all as bad and refuse to run the moment they detect their presence.

So, we take our installation of Bioshock and try to run it firstly with no DVD or the wrong one in the drive, we get the following error with a link to the Securom site. Now, let's see what Game Jackal Pro can do about this.

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