Did Mac games on CD and DVD actually have copy protection? I checked, disc by disc.
Floppy-era Mac copy protection is well documented. The optical era is another story. PC collectors know the names from those years: SafeDisc, SecuROM, StarForce. Ask about Mac games on CD or DVD and you mostly get a shrug. Some boxes mention protection, some discs have suspicious folders, but as far as I know nobody had sat down and checked what each game actually does when you start it.
So I did. I dumped ten Mac optical discs from 1994 to 2009 (Chessmaster 3000, Aliens vs Predator Gold, SimCity 4 Deluxe, KOTOR, Quake 4, XIII, Bionicle, Republic: The Revolution, Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword...) with Aaru, measured their physical surface, disassembled the executables, and tested originals against burned copies on real hardware.
Some findings:
- None of them uses physical copy protection: no damaged sectors, no timing tricks.
- Most only check the volume name, and some ask Mac OS X whether the disc is in a real drive rather than mounted from an image.
- Civilization IV doesn't check for the disc at all.
- XIII, Bionicle and Republic carry Macrovision's SafeDisc for Mac OS X, which works nothing like the PC version: a decoy executable, a multi-gigabyte filler file of signed random data, and disguised function names.
- Quake 4 and Civ IV show strange density bands on the disc surface, but neither game ever looks at them.
Along the way I fixed two bugs in Aaru's HFS/HFS+ support and added data position measurement to it, so the work benefits anyone dumping Mac CDs and DVDs.
Full write-up (free to read on my Patreon blog), with the surface graphs and everything that broke along the way: https://www.patreon.com/claunia/posts/hunting-copy-on-171989661
Part 2 is already written: I finally got a graphics card working on the Snow Leopard Hackintosh and ran XIII, Bionicle and Republic with the original discs, burned copies and mounted images, to see SafeDisc for Mac OS X do its thing on real hardware. It's up for patrons now and goes public next week.
Happy to answer questions about any of the discs.
