Review of Slysoft Game Jackal Pro

One of the most annoying things about being a legitimate purchaser of PC games is copy protection. We fill our hard drive with gigabytes of game data, and yet still we have to dig out the original CD or DVD and have it in the drive before we can play something we payed money for. This annoyance is spared for pirates, they get a hacked version without what are lovingly known as CD or DVD checks.

Basically, when you launch a copy protected game, it will have some mechanism (of which there are many variants) to detect if your game disk is original or not, and only then let you play it. This is fine if you only own one game, or only play one game until you complete it before trying another, or your game disk doesn't get scratched too much from leaving it out of a case balanced on your desk because you got fed up with leaning up to the top shelf where you keep your game boxes every time you want to change your poison.

Which leads us nicely on to Slysoft's interesting utility called Game Jackal Pro, which is designed to remove this chore completely and allow you to play any copy protected PC game without having the original disk in the machine. Now, yes, there are other commercial utilities like Alcohol 120% and Daemon Tools which will let you make an image of your original disk (protection and all), then mount it on a virtual drive, but the snag here is you end up with more optical drives than you might otherwise want (your original one, and your virtual one).

Another problem with Alcohol 120% and Daemon Tools is publishers hatred of such products, which can be used to play a copy of a game you never actually bought. So copy-protection mechanisms these days also go a long way in the constant battle against piracy, up to the point of refusing to load at all if these two utilities are installed. Which leads to companies on both sides constantly updating software to beat the other.

Meanwhile, Game Jackal Pro is sneaking around under the radar quietly letting you play your genuinely installed originals, without having to have a virtual drive at all. Which is nice isn't it!



We thought we'd test the software with a particularly problematic title, Bioshock. For us, this has consistently been troublesome with Windows 7 64 bit and virtual drive software, and this is with the original disk inserted. Part of the problem is whilst there are plenty of legitimate reasons for having virtual drive utilities like Daemon Tools and Alcohol 120% on your PC, some copy protection schemes treat them all as bad and refuse to run the moment they detect their presence.

So, we take our installation of Bioshock and try to run it firstly with no DVD or the wrong one in the drive, we get the following error with a link to the Securom site. Now, let's see what Game Jackal Pro can do about this.

Installation

Installation of the software is pretty easy and straightforward, after a reboot you are ready to go. Nothing is running until you launch the utility itself, so you don't have any extra windows or system tray icons at this stage. So to get the thing going you launch the Game Jackal application as you'd expect and are presented with the main profile screen, with various options along the top for creating new profiles, managing the ones you have already and launching games.

Profiling a Game

The first thing you do is create a profile for the game you want to play without the disk inserted. This is done by launching the 5 step profile wizard, that asks you for the drive you have the original disk in, a generic or specific profile that matches the game you wish to play, in our example Bioshock. Next you can give the profile a name if required, and see some game specific instructions on what Game Jackal requires to capture the information it needs to run the game disk-less.



Next up you have to tell it where the game executable is stored, however built in profiles pretty much take you there already, and lastly you are presented with an option to image the entire disk if you think it is required (mostly it isn't), and start analysing the game the moment it detects the CD or DVD in the drive.



Once you've inserted the original disk, Game Jackal minimises to the system tray and it begins to start up the game for real, taking note of what parts of the disk the game reads. Once you are into the title screen, you can quit the game, after which Game Jackal scans the original disk in the drive, building an image, analysing the CD or DVD and then finalising the profile. That's it, you are done, you can eject the disk and you won't need to insert it anymore. Providing you launch the game from the Game Jackal Pro interface, it will always work as if you had the disk inserted, copy protection satisfied.


The whole process takes about seven minutes including the time it takes to build a disk image, and is incredibly easy to follow. It works extremely well and can be pretty much left unattended once you've loaded and quit the game. If you have loads of games installed, you can take advantage of it's folder options for grouping profiles together. And as an added bonus, you can even use parental controls on titles as well.

One other nice feature is the ability to right click any game icon on your desktop and have Game Jackal make a profile from there, so you don't even have to launch the application first, a neat touch that.

Conclusion

With alternatives like Daemon Tools and Alcohol 120% mainly geared towards imaging an entire disk, which with DVDs can really consume a lot of hard drive space, Game Jackal Pro offers an extremely elegant and useful solution to the problem of disk swapping amongst avid PC gamers.

Not only does it allow you to not require your original disk in the drive, it is perfect for people who duplicate their game installations on second machines such as laptops, and do not wish to carry around the CDs and DVDs of their already installed games everywhere they go with them.

Following a similar update scheme as other Slysoft products such as AnyDVD, it is priced at a quite reasonable 29 euros for two years worth of free updates. This is really not a huge amount to pay for something so useful, it's cheaper than replacing scratched disks, and much cheaper than the competition.

Pros

• Very easy to use
• Parental guardian features
• Saves wear and tear on media
• Doesn't create a virtual drive
• High level of game compatibility
• Regularly updated
• Good skinnable user interface
• Additional useful options
• Trial version available

Cons

• Hard to find any