StarForce offers $3000...

... to the one who can prove their copy protection scheme damages hardware.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=28442

Somehow I highly doubt there will be a winner...

It screws up Windows, not hardware! The last two StarForce protected game demos I tried (CRC2005 being one of them) caused blue screens of death. Suffice it to say, I haven't rushed out to buy them.

CD/DVD-ROM Drives are cheap.... don't care if it really break my drive, but I'm really annoyed about a software that installs something unidentified to my system.

Yeah. It doesn't damage hardware (if software could actually damage hardware, virus programmers would have been doing it for ages), like James says it screws up Windows!

StarForce is the reason I'm not buying the new Prince of Persia (at least not until there's a working crack, and working StarForce removal tool). No matter how good it is, it's just not worth the headache of potentially having to completely reinstall my computer. Again. Thanks alot Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory.

Besides which I hardly think 3000 USD is worth screwing up your hardware over.

"if software could actually damage hardware, virus programmers would have been doing it for ages"

Well I don't know if it counts, but it is possible to damage the data in a bios to the point that the motherboard won't work. And the same for any hardware that has a flash rom. That's why anytime you flash a rom they warn you that you should run in safe mode. If it crashes or the power goes out, bye bye motherboard.

Pretty much any component in your PC could have a flash rom in it. They all need software to run. Does it really make a difference if they're actually damaging the hardware if the hardware becomes useless as a result?

That said, I doubt Starforce is mucking with flash roms.

It's a bummer to hear it's on the PoP game as I was into getting that.

I gave up on PC games. Too much copy protection for content thats generally buggy anyway.

Would nintendo/Sony get away with buggy console releases?


Don't answer that :P Not as much as on PC thats for sure.

I wont get The Two Thrones for PC since in Warrior Within, the "run up wall" feature couldnt tell if i was walking into the wall, or trying to run up it.... i doubt theyve got this one perfect either.

Finished it on GC though!

Did the first one on PC, got the second sitting in a "to be played" pile (on PC). Whenever I install a PC game I download the latest patch before even bothering to play.

Why should i have to download a crapload of patches? They got it right on Gamecube. Why do they release bogus games on PC?

The PC it gets played on does not have internet access.

yeah, its impossible to remove 100% of glitches but a killer bug like not being able to run up the wall?

I say, dont play WW on your PC. there are some moves that are impossible (throw a knife while balancing on a beam? nope...) on PC where you can do it on Gamecube.

[edit]

i'd like to add i'm NOT biased here. Even the Gamecube one has bugs like turning into the sand-beast before you're supposed to and then being unable to complete the game because of it. never happened to me but if it did i'd have to take the game back for it.

I've got a GC, but now I have WW on PC, I'm gonna have to play it on that or it's money wasted, I'll patch it up and let u know how I get on.

Thanks, after patching, walk up to a wall.

now, try to run up that wall from a standing start.

it doesnt work for me, it works on GC, but Not PC.

By the way- the GC has a bug of its own! "An error has occurred, Please turn off.. etc etc etc, blah blah".. I *hate* that too.

Can you tell i'm grumpy about this? :D

I've never seen a GC crash but have seen PS2 ones.

Blimey! We're already up to NFS Most Wanted patch v1.3!??? were the developers high?!

My GC crashes rarely.. There was also one on show in Virgin megastore that had the crash screen up. Glad the PS2 does it too :P

I remeber the days when patches were only released to solve driver compatibility issues....now we get games that dont have enough Q&A testing and somehow slip through with bugs in the games themselves.
(Daikatana or Battlefield 1942 anyone?)

As for StarForce, no probs here, but man have I heard many horror stories about it, thankfully it doesn't "wreck" anything here (driver/hardware-wise) with my CD/DVD-R drives.

Splinter cell wrecked my ability to record successfully. I didnt find out until recently what caused it :/

Ah yes, the joys of retail version of stuff :)

It comes to something when people are turning to pirated software and illegal NoCD patches to make their software usable.

yeah starforce can stop your DVD or CD burner working correctly. Whether that comes under their $3000, offer I doubt very much that it does.

I had no end of trouble with X3:reunion that uses starforce but did get around it by disconnecting my 2nd IDE channel with the burner om via a neat little tool. You still have to have a regular DVD Rom player to run the stupid disk though :(

You should be able to get away with making a 1:1 in Alcohol 120% and mount it in Daemon Tools (with RMPS on), using your previously mentioned tool, should work just fine =] Works for every game except Worms 4 (where you have to physically remove your IDE optical drives from the motherboard).

In any case, I have no hardware or software damage problems with SF personally, but StarForce games don't pass the copy detection process at the start on my Pioneer DVD burner. Which means if it weren't for 'alternate methods' I wouldn't be able to play them at all. It's the first copy protection that has FORCED me to copy it (to image form) in order to be able to just play it.

I won't buy a starforce 4 protected game either...

StarForce is EVIL!

This %$/%&§ caused me so many trouble. I've bought PortRoyale 2 and could not play it. All I got was a SF-Message telling me I'm using a blackcopy.

So I had to install Alcohol, DaemonTools and all the stuff to overcome SF. Days of work to play a buggy game I bought.

Same @#!* with StarWars Battlefield (the latest and last game I bought with SF-Protection). It took me over 6 hours to make my original (!) DVD run.

Conclusion: SF is an evil piece of software used by an evil industry. And the more they want to control us the more they're loosing consumers to piracy. Why should I buy games any longer when I have to crack them anyway?

In the really old days (about 1984) a friend of me made a program that broke the monitor.
In those days the sync was 100% controlled by the computer and increasing the vertical sync
to about 200 Hz made the monitor useless after. The ASM snippet was never released, it was just an experiment we did.
Todays monitors just refuse to hang on if the sync is too high, but not our monochrome monitor of 1984, he he

There was also a program around on the C64 that made the
stepmotor of the floppydrive play music by stepping it
insanely fast, it usually broke the drive after an hour or so...

Finally there are the viruses that try to fash your BIOS,
they can be "lucky" if there is no shadow and crash it all...

Heh,

If a SF protected game required me to remove a burner from the board, It'd go back. whats that? No refunds? I might have copied it? no @#!* sherlock, but it doesn't *work*!! I don't know why starforce has become so popular. and yes, Games like Splinter Cell will lie cracked open on my drive because i will *not* install the original CD.

I remember that one. It played 'Daisy' on the drive as I recall. I used it once and didn't have any problems, but I heard about other people who had their drives wreaked by it. I hope modern drives aren't susceptible to that kind of hacking.

This is actually possible and it has been done in the past, probably the most well known was the virus that turned off system fans. not all of course and only a few system were affected as not all systems have software controlled fans.

but some do.

Then there was the Bios virus that flashed your chip wrecking your motherboard.

then there was the Virus that did( I dont recall specifics) something to a hardrives file allocation table that made it write everything to the one cluster and segment which in the end just wrecks the drive.

there are tons of them. they are just not used as often as the others due to the potential for damage and the fact that they dont spread well, cos what they infect they destroy, and a virus cant spread if it kills off all its infected systems.

There was a smart arse in 1997 that wrote a virus that messed up a hardrive dont have a clue how it was done the source was never released, but he dropped in a timer and all infected systems were hit on the same day, thanfully tho the anti virus community got hold of it before d-day and most people were saved the pain.

Virus should never be taken for granted, never assume they cant do any harm and never assume that a format and reinstall will clear up all your problems.

You should all be using virus software, a good firewall and be carefull of what you download and where you download it from.

There was a good one back in the Miggy days that hijacked the filesystem and wrote out data in a non compatible way to the original. Eventually it would write over a critical sector (like the bootblock) and next reset your disk turned out to be totalled.

Also interesting is how a thread about StarForce turned into virus talk ;]

I'm getting sick of this problem. Everytime I try to run a game it asks for the disk - even though the game is on my harddrive - inconvenient and irritating. Even if it was 1 in every 5 times would be something.

Now everybody is treated like a criminal and copy protection is getting to the point were legitimate users are penalised - I hear Sony is producing copy protection that prevents people putting their bought CD onto their MP3 player.

I stopped playing Half-life because I had to have internet connection everytime I played and it sometimes took ages to activate.

Sony have been sued by two countries for their measures. They have since recalled any of their DRM infected discs.

This virus was called Chernobyl... My friend had it and ended up bying a new computer. There are some disasms of the virus available because I had it in one of the books about virused I used to have. You couldn't compile it but it showed some algorythms used.

King Kong. good game. Starforce.

Broken laptop.


Nuff said.



..Okay, it actually just did something to my windows installation software and yet again has broken my writer.

In the old days you could program virus which would switch resolutions so fast that your CRT screen would die.