They haven't updated their soft for 9 months.. Small forum activity...No new, upcoming versions announcements... Does anone know sth about it?

I'm not surprised really since less and less people burn DVDs. USB sticks are so widespread, easier to use, and less prone to corruption.

I used their stuff a lot - used to get a "Lite" version with my Plextor drives (which used to cost quite a bit back then). You could get the bulk version or the retail version which came with Nero so I went retail. You paid about $60 more for that. When Starforce then killed the drive, I discovered that bundled Nero only works with one particular drives so my new drive (which was bulk), wouldn't work with it. Me = pissed off.

In the end, I just cracked it, and didn't feel guilty at all because, right after they released version 6 or so, Vista was released and instead of patching the very-new version 6, they released version 7 (or it might be version 5 & 6, I can't remember). Basically, they screwed over their customers which included my father who had bought it. After that I dumped Nero and used UltraISO to burn CD/DVD images - much simplier and light weight and doesn't require intrusive drivers, services and agents.

A long time ago (back in 2001-2?) I started to make CloneCD images of all my CD's. Then Alcohol got better so I switched to that.....

Then I started to notice how the copy protection was screwing up things so I realized that I was still cracking the games anyway (not to mention that some times you couldn't really make a 100% perfect image anyway)....so I switched to ISO/Bin.cue for all CD images instead (more future proof) and just cracked all the games instead.

I was also pissed when Alcohol switched to activation (almost right after I bought Alcohol) so instead of having to deal with that BS I just used a cracked copy.....but again I stopped doing that because I just cracked the games instead and free ISO programs like ImgBurn are all I need anyway.

So all you need nowadays are a free image mounting program like Daemon Tools and ImgBurn and the latest crack and you're good to go. (and if you don't buy CD/DVD then all you need is the crack)

Sorry but don’t you mix Nero AG with Alcohol Soft – those are 2 separate companies. Nero AG produced Nero Burning Rom while Alcohol Soft - Alcohol 52%/120%. I don’t use Nero for a long time now switched for Alcohol 52% for making images and BurnAware Free for burning. I’ve made LOTS of images using Alcohol52% and think that’s one of the best soft on the market. The problem is that I don’t understand their business philosophy: I mean a while ago (when HDDs were expensive and relatively small) burning CD/DVD 1:1 copies (that is Alcohol 120% main purpose) was important – but nowadays it’s quite useless feature. Why should I bother with burning 1:1 copy when I can make image of a CD/DVD and store/use it mounted? For that I can use freeware Alcohol 52%. I would rather pay, say half a price of Alcohol120% for Alcohol 52%, than see Alcohol Soft gone from market.

Switch Daemon Tools for Virtual CloneDrive. ;)

Me - quite the opposite: at a certain moment I switched from DT to Alcohol52%. I preferred it because it offered in-build DRM detector, clocking module and predefined imaging profiles. I also went under the impression that Alcohol gets more updates than DT. As you say – with nowadays DRM based on Internet activation – emulation software becomes obsolete but I still own tens of older games which have DRM based on media – and I want to have ability to play them directly from image.

Windows 95
Daemon Tools 3.47

Windows 98-ME-NT4
Daemon Tools 3.47
MagicDisk 1.05
Virtual CloneDrive 5450

NT 3.51-NT4-2000
ImDisk

Windows 2000+
Daemon Tools
OSFMount
Virtual CloneDrive
WinCDEMU

;)

I bought DT back before 1.0 was released, so I get another couple of years of support and upgrades, but I rarely use it anymore. Anything new I buy is a digital download anyway, so there's nothing new to rip. And I have never burned a 1:1 image, I usually burn about six of them on a single DVD instead.

Then Alcohol 52% went free, and DT went to a very annoying activation scheme that left me locked out of it for a couple of days, I basically decided I wasn't ever going to upgrade.

I think the toughest game I had to run from an image was Forged Alliance, IIRC. It needed the Virtual IDE. But now I got that from GamersGate so I only need images for Rise of Nations and maybe for some of the NFS games.

I could never get their burning software to work on Win 7 so I switched to ImgBurn. For that matter, I couldn't get Nero working either. Something wrong with whatever is used to detect the drive.

I prefer a crack that defeats the old copy protections because they can wreak havoc with your OS. Try installing the retail version of Witcher on Windows 7 and you'll get constant errors about non-functioning drivers thanks to Tages. Then there's Starforce (which won't work on Windows 7 anyway) and there's quite a number of other examples. With cracks bypassing them, you don't need such software nor do you need to keep the image loaded.

... Starforce won't work on Windows 7?!

Fffffffffffffffffffffffffuck. :(

I was an (illegitimate) Alcohol user, but more and more of my legitimate software kept complaining about it so I just stopped using it. Nowadays I use WinCDEmu for loading images... but that's it.

I liked Alcohol but somewhere down the line it just got too... cumbersome.