Alcohol Software is one of the latest companies that tries to earn a share in the CD recording software market. 10/10/2002 was the official release date of Alcohol 120%, software that is able to write to CD and DVD recordables and also has Virtual CD-ROM/DVD-ROM technology on board, which lets you play an image of CD or DVD from your hard disk.
Besides that the software has emulation features that should enable users to run a backup from their hard disk without the need of the original CD/DVD. Because the software is new, we have talked to the developer of the software, Martinx, to see what he is planning to bring us in the future and where the software is currently capable of.
Yes, about the name Alcohol. LOL. In fact, it comes from a Spanish dictionary. I found one English-Spanish dictionary, I had found this word Alcohol meaning "SPIRIT" (similar to Fantom) in Spanish. So we decided to use this cool name .
There are three developers involved in the Alcohol 120%, 68% 52% development and VeNoM386 is my good friend. He is not part of our development team, but he gives us some ideas and help concerning emulations and virtual drive implementation. That is why our emulation part may have many things in common with DAEMON Tools.
As you already know I was the top developer for another company, but felt restricted, so I and a few others in the team left and started up our own company where we would have full control on decisions and be able to implement things very quickly ourselves, which we thought what features people would really like to see in a software and not what my previous company would liked others to have.
Yes, there are some software apps currently doing the same work, but no one can make users
satisfied. As you know I have already quit my previous job three month ago. Lots of my friends wanted me to create another new program to satisfy their usual needs. I only had about 40 days rest, I started to work on this new one. I have totally rewriten the whole dumping/recording engine, and I will enhance it with features which people really want in the near future.
We will at least try to emulate all new protections from a virtual drive, as it is not so easy to burn the majority of them, as you may know. So for now emulation will play a very big part in the backup of protected games. In saying this we'll defintely try to find some solution for CD-R/RW backups. Just give us more time.
And about the PS2 and Xbox games, currently we have no time to take care of them, but I promise, if we have more time, we will try it .
We have tested from virtual drive most commercial protections currently available.
We can already beat most of them. The main problem we have is that many protection developers are playing a foul game and directly blacklist our software so that users could not play their backups even from virtual drive. But it is of course temporary problem for us which we have alreay found a solution and will keep our software the most up to date that is available for our users.
The software is still in its early stages and there will be many great features added, but being able to test your image before burning to disc is a very usefull feature as it lets you know wether you are having problems with reading or writing if you test the image on virtual device first. It's also good that you can mount other images from other software as its not limited to only Alcohol images.
With built in hide ATIP information, DVD region emulator and a host of other great features and still lots more to come I'm sure you would agree we are already heading in the right direction for the perfect emulation / burning software that users really want.
We are using Microsoft Visual C++ and Borland C++ Builder mostly, sometimes we use free compilers (Dev-C++ or GCC(cygwin)) to do some tests.
Currently no, but we plan to do it very soon.
We try very hard to let the user emulate the disc at first, if users don't have the right hardware to make a copy, but could still have one copy on their harddisk. It's currently very hard to say what the future will bring as you know things change very quickly, but we believe we have the team behind us to be at the forefront of any changes we may see.
The first thing is to generate the recently introduced MDS files as you mentioned. Then premastering from hard drive and some very nice things that you will find soon.
The latest prices can always be found on our home page at www.alcohol-software.com. The license terms are in the software that you can read, but we are very open and there is nothing to hide. Frequent updates is essential in a software like this as im sure you are aware.
Yes we feel there is a large gap in the market for a software that can manage to do the things people really want and will try our best to listen to the public and try and impliment as much as possible what they really want and not what we think they should want.
Alcohol software is very early in development and you will se some very really nice additions in the near future while trying to keep the most competitive price for a software of this kind.
We have the knowledge and the capacity to make Alcohol Software development the software of choice for most users.We believe that Alcohol will be the no1 software for a long time to come.
As you can read the company is planning to implement a lot of new features. However our experiences with software developers are that this doesn't go in one night. If Alcohol Software is able to what it is planning it will certainly be a very usefull and essential tool for those who want to backup their protected software.
More information and downloads of the software can be found on the website of Alcohol Software. If you would like more information of other users and need help with the software, feel free to post on our Burning Software Forum.
