Alcohol 120%

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Alcohol 120%
Image:A120 logo.png

Image Making Wizard in Alcohol 120% running on Windows Vista
Developed by Alcohol Soft
Latest release 1.9.7.6221 / February 23, 2008 (2008-02-23); 107 days ago
OS Microsoft Windows
Genre CD/DVD emulation, recording software
License Proprietary, Demoware, Shareware
Website Alcohol-Soft (developers)
Alcohol 120% Italy (Italian)

Alcohol 120% is an optical disc authoring program and disk image emulator created by Alcohol Soft. Alcohol 120% began as a direct continuation of the defunct Fantom CD CD-ROM drive emulation software.

Contents

[edit] Features

Alcohol 120% can create disk images, either in its proprietary Media Descriptor Image file format, or in a number of other popular formats (listed below). The second popular feature of the program is its capability to emulate up to 31 virtual drives to mount disk images, making it unnecessary to have a physical copy of the disc. Alcohol Soft claims that virtual drives can operate at over 200 times the speed of the conventional CD-ROM drive, depending on hard disk speed.[1] Alcohol 120% can also be used to burn these images (as well as those created by other software) back onto CDs and DVDs. It supports simultaneous writing to multiple CD/DVD writers. Alcohol, like other disk imaging software such as Daemon Tools, incorporates rootkit technology.[2]

[edit] Supported File Types

These formats are supported by the image mounting feature of Alcohol 120%:

These formats are supported by the image making tool:

[edit] Copy Prevention

Alcohol 120%'s image recording feature is capable of bypassing certain copy prevention schemes, such as SafeDisc, SecuROM, and Data Position Measurement (DPM). It can also create images from PlayStation and PlayStation 2 file systems. Certain copy protection schemes require burner hardware that is capable of passing along the copy protection.

The program does not back up DVD titles encrypted with the Content Scramble System. Alcohol Soft cites present legal restrictions for the decision not to include this feature.

Some software manufacturers employ software blacklist methods to prevent Alcohol 120% from copying the software. There are third party tools available that attempt to counteract the blacklist methods, such as Anti-blaxx and CureROM.

[edit] Alcohol 52%

Alcohol 52% is a version of Alcohol 120% without the burning engine. It can still create image files, and mount those images onto up to 6 virtual drives. There are two versions of Alcohol 52%, free and 30-day trial. The free version contains an adware toolbar bundled.

[edit] Alcohol 68%

Alcohol 68% was an intended version of Alcohol 120% that only included a disc-burning engine, with no drive emulation. This proved to be unpopular and the program was phased out.

[edit] Awards

  • European ShareWare Conference 2006 Epsilon Award [3]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Alcohol Soft trial version download.
  2. ^ Russinovich, Mark (2006). Using Rootkits to Defeat Digital Rights Management. Retrieved on 2008-02-17.
  3. ^ Alcohol Software Wins Epsilon Award for Software Excellence (PDF) (2006). Retrieved on 2007-02-28.

[edit] See also

[edit] Related file formats

[edit] External links

v • d • e
Disk image file formats
Personal Computers
MAC / UNIX
Deprecated / Proprietary / Other
v • d • e
Optical Disc Image Software (comparison by OS)
Windows
Macintosh
Linux
Unix-like
cdrtools  · dd  · dvd+rw-tools  · EAR  · GEAR PRO Unix  · K3b