NEC ND-2500A DVD±RW recorder - Page 6

- Reading Tests

To create an image of the various protected titles onto a hard disk, we used CloneCD v.4.3.1.9 software and the appropriate settings, depending on the protection scheme of the inserted discs. Below are summarized the capabilities of the NEC drive, according to CloneCD software. As can be seen, the drive supports writing of CD+G under RAW DAO:

The game titles we used with their respective protection schemes are given in the table below:

Lybcrypt

SafeDisc v.2

SecuROM v.2

The NEC drive managed to rip the contents of all the game titles successfully. Apart from SafeDisc v2, where the ripping speeds for both drives are very slow, times for the other two protection schemes are very good.

- Writing Tests

The NEC ND-2500A supports the DAO-RAW writing mode. For checking the drive's EFM correction status, we used 3 different game titles with different SafeDisc 2 versions with the latest software patches installed. After making the images of the various titles to the hard disk, we burned them (at maximum speed) with CloneCD. Two different discs were created for each title; one with the "Amplify Weak Sectors" enabled and one more with the function disabled.

The table below shows the results of the attempted backups and whether they ran (game installed / played normally), or not.

The NEC ND-2500A was not all that impressive in making working backups of protected game titles. The drive managed to copy only up to version 2.6 of SafeDisc. Moreover, the working backups were playable only in the NEC drive. No other drive managed to playback the NEC drive's backups.