Hardware Two Questions about Drives and Copy Protections

[mediafox]

I have two questions:

1. I know, DVD Regions are only used for video-DVDs, but I think that also software-DVDs, e.g. games, could use it. I imagine it like this: A code similar to the program "DVD Region Info" would check the Region of the drive and compare the result to a value saved in the program code (The software would check the Region of the drive; the drive would not check the Region of the DVD). Only if the two values are identical, would the program run. Would such a protection be possible? Would "DVDFab Passkey" bypass it by "hiding" the real Region of the drive and simulating another Region?

2. Is there a way for a DVD/CD to find out whether it is running from a physical drive or just from a virtual drive (except by just checking whether there are programs installed on the computer that can simulate a virtual drive), or, in case of physical drives, whether the drive has been flashed with RPC-1 or autoreset firmware?

Thank you in advance

[signals]

AFAIK:
Software on the PC reads the region code from the disc, and Passkey is between the disc and the OS, so anything that uses the OS disc I/O will see what Passkey presents. Some drives have firmware that reads the region code from the disc and checks it internally to see if it agrees with the drive's internal region setting before anything on the PC is involved (notably Matshita in the past, not sure about the present). Not sure about the rest of your question. ??