@FoxDisc
@ 1) The hack enables some special commands. Indeed it enables a command that allows to read out each raw sector, but this does not work with these special areas we're interested in. Currently we use another command to do a memdump of the ram of the drive to get the goodies we like to get. So yes, you can get the VolumeID and all that stuff but you can't get the sectors which contain these information. Therefor it is not possible to make a true 1:1 image.
@ 2) Yes, exactly because of that reason this stuff was invented, prevent 1:1 copies to "copy" the copy protection
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@ 3) This is a possible solution and remembers me of the game backup scene when they used physical disc density files (don't know anymore how this was called, its been a long time ago for me) to give the emulator the required extra information which was not inside the image file. And to make something clear, device != drive. If i understood bcrabl corretly he wanted to avoid the need of device keys because he wants to emulate an aacs enabled drive, like daemon tools emulates various game protections. He just missed the drive certificate that such a drive must have, and because of that the whole emulation stuff is useless.
The only benefit of such a virtual drive would be if its easier to find a drive certificate than a processing key and maybe later sequence keys. But right now we have a MKBv3 processing key and still no MKBv3 host certificate and we never had a drive certificate.
