Alcohol 120% is a disk image emulator created by Alcohol Soft. It can create and mount disc images in the proprietary Media Descriptor File format. Images in this format consist of a pair of .mds and .mdf files. Alcohol 120% can also convert image files to the ISO format. Alcohol Soft has cited it will not be developing an image editor for Alcohol 120%. The latest versions of Alcohol 120% comes with "Alcohol Cloaking Initiative for DRM" (A.C.I.D), which hides emulated drives from

SecuROM SecuROM was a CD/ DVD copy protection and digital rights management (DRM) product developed by Sony DADC. It aims to prevent unauthorised copying and reverse engineering of software, primarily commercial computer games running on Microsoft Windo ...

7 and

SafeDisc ''SafeDisc'' is a copy protection program for Microsoft Windows applications and games distributed on optical disc. Created by Macrovision Corporation, it was aimed to hinder unauthorized disc duplication. The program was first introduced in 19 ...

Features

Alcohol 120%'s image making tool supports the following formats: * Media Descriptor File (default), consisting of a pair of .mds and .mdf *

ISO image An optical disc image (or ISO image, from the ISO 9660 file system used with CD-ROM media) is a disk image that contains everything that would be written to an optical disc, disk sector by disc sector, including the optical disc file system. ...

(.iso) Furthermore, Alcohol 120% can mount the following images: *

CloneCD CloneCD is proprietary optical disc authoring software that makes exact, 1:1 copies of music and data CDs and DVDs, regardless of any Digital Rights Management (DRM) restrictions. It was originally written by Oliver Kastl and offered by Swiss ...

image, consisting of a trio of

.ccd A CloneCD Control File is a text descriptor with the extension .ccd used by CloneCD to mark the properties of a CD/DVD image. These files need to be combined with an image file (usually with .img extension) to be burned. It may also come with a ...

.img img or IMG is an abbreviation for image. img or IMG may also refer to: * IMG (company), global sports and media business headquartered in New York City but with its main offices in Cleveland, originally known as the "International Management Group ...

, and .sub files *Raw images, consisting of a pair of .bin and

.cue A cue sheet, or cue file, is a metadata file which describes how the tracks of a CD or DVD are laid out. Cue sheets are stored as plain text files and commonly have a filename extension. CDRWIN first introduced cue sheets, which are now supp ...

files Alcohol 120%'s image recording feature is capable of bypassing certain

copy protection Copy protection, also known as content protection, copy prevention and copy restriction, describes measures to enforce copyright by preventing the reproduction of software, films, music, and other media. Copy protection is most commonly found o ...

schemes, such as

, and Data Position Measurement (DPM). However, certain copy protection schemes require burner hardware that is capable of reproducing the copy protection. It can also create images of PlayStation and PlayStation 2 file systems. It lacks the ability to back up DVD titles encrypted with the

Content Scramble System The Content Scramble System (CSS) is a digital rights management (DRM) and encryption system employed on many commercially produced DVD-Video discs. CSS utilizes a proprietary 40-bit stream cipher algorithm. The system was introduced around 1996 ...

. Due to legal restrictions, Alcohol Soft has opted not to include this feature. Some software manufacturers employ software blacklisting methods to prevent Alcohol 120% from copying their discs. Initially, users had to use third party tools to counteract the blacklisting, such as Anti-blaxx, CureROM, and Y.A.S.U. Later, Alcohol 120% included its own "Alcohol Cloaking Initiative for DRM" (A.C.I.D) component.

Other editions

* Alcohol 52% is a version of Alcohol 120% without the burning engine. It can still create image files, and mount those images on up to 31 virtual drives. There are two versions of Alcohol 52%, free and 30-day trial. The free version contains an optional

adware Adware, often called advertising-supported software by its developers, is software that generates revenue for its developer by automatically generating online advertisements in the user interface of the software or on a screen presented to the ...

toolbar bundled and is limited to 6 virtual drives. * Alcohol 68% is a version of Alcohol 120% without media emulation capabilities, providing only the CD/DVD burning functions. It has since been discontinued and integrated into Alcohol 120%. * Alcohol 120% Free Edition is a free for non-commercial use version of Alcohol 120% with certain limitations. These include only being able to burn to one drive at a time, only using up to two virtual drives and no copy protection emulation options. * Alcohol 120% Retro Edition is a free version only for personal use on

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturi ...

/ 98/ Me/ XP (it cannot be run on

Vista Vista usually refers to a distant view. Vista may also refer to: Software *Windows Vista, the line of Microsoft Windows client operating systems released in 2006 and 2007 * VistA, (Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture) ...

or later), allowing retrogamers to mount image files when using PCem or

VMWare Workstation VMware Workstation Pro (known as VMware Workstation until release of VMware Workstation 12 in 2015) is a hosted (Type 2) hypervisor that runs on x64 versions of Windows and Linux operating systemshttps://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/sear ...

( DOSBox Pure cannot run it, because doing so will no doubt cause a

crash Crash or CRASH may refer to: Common meanings * Collision, an impact between two or more objects * Crash (computing), a condition where a program ceases to respond * Cardiac arrest, a medical condition in which the heart stops beating * Couch su ...

). Li Wen'en (李文恩) talked about the issue with the developers, however, because many early programming tools were lost, the debugging becomes very difficult, causing the problem may be quite time-consuming to fix or even be postponed

Awards

*European ShareWare Conference 2006 Epsilon Award

References

External links

*
Alcohol 52% Free Edition
{{DEFAULTSORT:Alcohol 120 Windows-only software Optical disc authoring software Disk image emulators Windows CD/DVD writing software

Features

Other editions

Awards

See also

References

External links