During start-up you will get a nice looking splash screen.
When SimDisc was start-up we got the following screen.
Here is where you turn your CDs and DVDs into images, so-called virtual discs. Simply select the proper drive for reading the disc, enter a suitable path and filename for the image, maybe select some of the extra options for more sophisticated copy protections if needed (you can check which copy protection is on the CD by using A-Ray Scanner or any other copy protection scanner), and press on Start to make an image of your CD your
hard disk.
As you can see our test CD has a copy protection, the protection used on this disc is SafeDisc v2.30.031.
SimDisc did continue to make the image without any problems at all.
To be able to test if our CD image works or not you first have to go to Virtual CD/DVD drives in the settings menu and make at least one virtual drive there.
Press first change, because than it will make the virtual drive and than press apply changes. This we found out after a few tries. You can also enable Auto play for the virtual drive.
With some copy protections it is better to leave this option off that is why it is by default disabled. But since SimDisc support up to 63 virtual drives of course when you Windows NT/2000/XP with Windows 9x/ME up to 23 drives max you easily could make a drive supporting auto play and
at least one which doesn't which than can be used for some copy protections while you use the drives with for movies, etc.
In Virtual CD/DVD drives in the main functions menu you can see which images you have stored and you can mount them by using one of the virtual drives.
By pressing the play button of the virtual drive you can select the image you want to mount.
We did test if our made image file of Emperor Battle for dune did work with the virtual drive and how fast it was we have to say we were very impressed with the speed also it worked with the copy protection, now of course we know SafeDisc v2.30.031 is pretty old and easy to get arround but any it worked
perfectly with SimDisc. Also it might be said that we found the speed of SimDisc is much better than of Daemon tools.
A nice feature which is included in SimDisc is to archive your Images on CDs again, one of the things which draw our intention was that you could add files to your archived image files when you archive them on CD which is really a very nice function which not many programs have.
With the build images menu you can easily make image files in ISO format also you can select how the CD/DVD will be named. One of the nice things is that you have a kind of status bar which shows you arround which size your ISO file will be,
pity thing is it does not support dual layer DVDs yet this might of course be solved in a future update.
A nice extra feature in SimDisc is the possibility to make your own labels for your images or for your own made iso files which you did archive on CD/DVD.
SimDisc also has for the less organized people a good function to search on your hole computer for images files this is an easy function because sometimes when you are in hurry you might copy your images files on different places.
In case you use CD/DVD Rewriteable SimDisc also includes an option to erase them.
SimDisc's DPM Mode what is it and what does it?
The DPM Mode is a specialty of SimDisc, it is based on a new technology developed by Engelmann Media GmbH and allows for successful conversion of especially protected discs in particular. In DPM mode, the exact physical location of each sector will be measured and this extra data will be stored in the image file as well so that the virtual disc is able to behave like the original disc. This measuring requires a lower reading speed than usual (due to precision issues) and thus takes up some additional time for creating a virtual disc of such an original CD/DVD. After measuring the whole disc, the actual reading process will be performed with the usual reading speed.
This is one of the things which makes SimDisc even more interesting. DPM mode can be selected in the copy settings menu.
Also it is possible to start-up SimDisc with windows by enabling this in general settings.
