Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Forum

I'm unable to run GTA VC on my Leopard system, it's doing the "No disc inserted. Please insert the Vice City PLAY disc." Disc is of course in and mounted properly. I've got CG 8.1.3 but have also tried using the trial of 9.2, and have tried installing with the c4p file provided on this site. Install works great, just doesn't recognize the disc to run. Verified that the drive is mapped in wineconfig. Also tried installing the vice 1.1 patch, with no change. Is the CD check routine not implemented in the Mac versions of CG? I supposed I could find myself a nocd patch but would rather avoid it if it's supposed to be working.

Specs probably aren't relevant but just in case:
MacBook Pro
2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo
2 GB RAM
OS X 10.5.8
ATI Radeon X1600, 256 MB VRAM

Hi,

If you reply to this, look at The Fine Print - '[i]Please refrain from the mention of DRM circumvention,
such as 'no-cd patches[/i]'. Consider that in your posting, you've actually broadcast to the world that
[insert your name] is prepared to do something possibly illegal (in your locale) to get the game going...
...I doubt you want that 8-)

I'll recheck this problem on the Mac here in a few hours, although my last test (wrt CXG-9.1) didn't
display any problems with the ['Play'] disc recognition...will post back...

Cheers!

OSX 10.6.4 -- iMac 11,2 w/ HD5670 / 21.5" display

Ahh...checking my C4P todo list, I see this is something I didn't get
around to in 9.1 -- {ahem}..the test (and medal ranking) on the Mac, was
relative to an installation of the game which, (for informational purposes
only to service Crossover users living in jurisdictions/locales other than
my own which allow DRM circumvention under terms of fair usage), contained
software such users could legally employ. This forms a check of the -game-
-software- itself, not the DRM used on the CD release. The game software
itself does run at silver level or better on the machine.spec cited above.
Apologies for any confusion here...and number of advocates and our Mighty
Ninjas are aware of this aspect where an app/game is either available from
multiple software distributors, or some release of the app/game don't work
with the same ease/at all on one platform versus another ...hopefully we'll
have a better way of presenting this information soon...ie; currently, with
the C4P banner and medal rankings etc etc, you really are forgiven for thinking
the CD release is going to work 'as presented' on OSX...

...but it won't, not the CD version anyhow. Cupcake Ninja asked me to collate
further details regarding which disc based DRM mechanisms work, and which don't,
in CXG across OSX/linux OS'...seems like here, is a good place to start.. 8)
It's not so much that this isn't implemented on OSX - it does work in linux ;
it's the design of the OSX scsi driver itself that thwarts it on the Mac...

The CD version of this title incorporates SecuROM's version 4 copy protection
system...I am unsure as to the subversion release used (if any). Both the disc
content and the game executable itself are encrypted. At installation time, the
protected data is read from disc, and regedit is called to propagate the working
windows registry with the relevant keys and registry data -- this much, does not
work in OSX. In fact, comparing the resultant registries between OSX & linux, gives
the impression this fails very early on in the piece with the Mac, no doubt because
the required data cannot be obtained from the disc...the disc, in effect, cannot be
read...the error generated of 'no disc in drive' is a tad misleading ; the terse
response should be 'cannot read current disk in drive' -or- 'wrong disk inserted,
please insert the correct disk and retry'...or such..that more closely mimics
the condition...

...I've a CD/DVD drive here with an access hole cut into the metal casing, enough
to aim a laser-tachometer at a marker on the drive-spindle cup to get revs per minute
information...rudimentary, but it can give a first look -- this system is for mine
certainly using drive speed control (at least), and the protected data would appear
to be packeted across the disc layout in a non sequential fashion (relative to the
underlying ISO standard used), so it might be pushing the read head around as well.
You could probably track this in linux using scsi_debug if you were in some sort
of inquisitive mood I cannot muster...<grin>...but, point is if the OSX scsi driver
does not allow manipulation of the optical drive at this (kernel)hardware level,
wine simply cannot provide that hardware access the win32 app wants...brick wall.

Note: YMMV in linux -- do not read into this that all disc based SecuROM v4 copy
protection systems work ; that may well not be the case...

Thanks for prodding me on this - I'll post another thread to make things more
apparent here wrt the CD version & OSX, but as it stands today this situation
is summed up here...;

http://www.codeweavers.com/support/wiki/dmca

Cheers!

Thanks for your reply Don. About the mention DRM circumvention, I think my statement was ambiguous and non-incriminating (Eg, I supposed I could go rob a bank, but would rather not take such action :). Even so re-reading it I see now that it doesn't contribute anything and it probably would have been better to leave it out, I'm sure there's been enough discussion of what's legal and where vs what's moral, etc. I was a bit frustrated and that apparently leaked through. It could almost sound like an immature threat, which wasn't my intention. (Who would I have been intending to threaten? Codeweavers? They're trying to help. Rockstar? Securom? Microsoft? I'm pretty sure the answer from all of them would be to use a Windows system). Anyway sorry about that.

Very interesting discovery that the issue has to do with the SCSI cdrom drive, I'm surprised to see hardware play in to it on this level. Another variable thrown in to the mix. Any idea of all Mac systems use the same types of SCSI drives?
I tried copying the contents of the disc to my HD and mapping that as the D drive in the GTAVC bottle, but still the same result. Could something be written that causes a folder to behave like the type of drive your cd check routine is expecting to run against, thus going around using the drive? Just a thought.

Hi there,

No big deal about your previous posting, I do understand what you're
saying there and clearly you can see/appreciate what I read instead..no
harm done.. ;)

It's not the scsi hardware drive, it's the scsi drivers that allow software
to talk to that hardware (via your system kernel) - in the OSX case that's
not talk to the scsi optical drive hardware... ;)

Mounting an image or such doesn't work most all of the time, virtual drive
software stands a better chance (but then you still need to be able to read
the 'watermark' data from the disk into an image first)...

Cheers!