Extract Topology using BWA builder Walkthru guide

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Posted on Wednesday 19th of May, 2004 at 09:54 by SirQUK
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Many thanks goto Chaosmaker for this great guide on how to extract topology using the Blindwrite BWA Builder in response to some readers emailing us and asking how to make perfect backups of their securom titles with Blindwrite. We hope this guide explains a little more about what is securom and how to identify and backup your titles.

Introduction:

Registered users of BlindWrite 5 have an advantage, It is called BB5.

What is BB5?

Well simply put it is the tool used to extract the needed topology from SecuRom protected disks. Something new that was added with this version of BB5 was the ability to clean any topology file up without the need of other tools. Hopefully this guide will help you understand how to use the BB5 and the clean-up of that not so perfect topology file.

Usage:

1st thing we need to do is open the BB5 as seen below.

2nd thing we need to do is make sure we have the right device you will use for reading, in the following picture you will need to hit the drop down as seen and select the device you will use to make the topology file. For this I used UT2K4 SE, this is a dvd-rom version game, this process is the same whether it is a cd or dvd-rom version game.

Once the reader is selected, it is time to click start:

After you've clicked start you will notice the next thing to take place stabilizing motor, what this does is makes sure that the device you are going to do is capable of doing a half decent job of creating a topology file and the amount of cache the drive is capable of because all operations require that nothing be cached and to do the topology, BB5 must have un-cached access to the drive in order to get the best possible topology file.

After the motor has been stabilized it is time to start writing the topology file, as you can see there is a nice easy to read progress bar.

Once the progress bar hits 100% the file has been extracted, you'll notice that the below topology doesn't look all that bad, but is only 96% and could be better. Now it's time to save this file. So just click file.

Now this is where you must pay special attention, as you can see in the bottom of the file it shows the drive letter used and the name of the disk in that drive, when you save this file the two names must match exactly, you'll notice that in the case the name of the BWA is UT2004_DVD, this is how the file must be saved in order to use it later.

Now lets see if we can't clean this BWA up and give it a 100% rating, first thing is to open BB5 again:

Next thing is to click file and then load:

You'll see the very same file you just saved. Now lets clean this BWA and see if we can get a 100% rated file. Click file again and then "Clean Last Loaded Curve", thats all there is to it, watch what happens.

The result of clicking clean last loaded curve, the file has gone from the one rated at 96% to the new clean one rated at 100%:

Now we need to save the newly cleaned and 100% rated BWA. Click file and then save as and just overwrite the the old UT2004_DVD BWA:

And thats it, you now have a BWA that is rated at 100% and ready to use with BlindWrite 5.

Please Note:

"This new BB5 is only available to registered users and will not work unless you are a registered user, it will Clean BlindWrite 4 BWA files in the same way, but only if Blindwrite 5 is installed."

look out for the next walkthru, which will explain how to use your new BWA file with BlindWrite 5. For this you will need the Blindwrite 5 tweaker that is developed by A-Ray software and can be found here http://www.aray-software.com/.

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