Star force protection afects CD\DVD drivers?

[The Godfather]

Hey I was just wandering...Do this protection efects in any way my optical drivers?:cool:

[Sidney]

No it doesn't.
The only people who have any problems at all are those who attempt to use the various utilities available in an attempt to play with a non-original cd/dvd.

[RincewindTheWiz]

Actually there are lots of reports of interference with the normal working of cd/dvd devices. This is because some Starforce versions introduce errors in the datastream, and the problem is that Windows will start throttling the speed of the drive after a certain, low number of errors. This gave some people really slow dvd-writers (which was fixable by deleting and reinstalling the IDE drivers), but there have also been reports of drives that stopped working correctly for good. I don't know how many people had this problem, but it is rumored that this was a big part of the lawsuit against Ubisoft over SF3 started by a few pissed off buyers.

[Ronin2k3]

@Sidney,

Actually there are numerous problems with SF drivers EVEN if one uses the original discs...

As an example, Bet on Soldier gave me a CTD (Crash to Desktop) while playing and so did Battlefield 2. Errors usually gave me indication of problems with my Creative Audigy 2. So, replaced card, errors continued, removed card, used onboard audio, errors still continued. Later, after some forum visits and research into this, these errors appeared to be introduced by StarForce. They dissapeared after official patching of the .exe, with a newer version of starforce.

I just heard that some developers eventually released a patch without SF, just to make the gamers happy...

[RincewindTheWiz]

Over here, BF2 uses Safedisk 4. Does it use SF3 in your country, or do you mean that the SF drivers interfere with other protections ? I wouldn't be surprised if they did the latter, SF is a very aggressive copy protection...

[Sidney]

I have never had any problems using any Starforce 3 protected game.
Their drivers are perfectly safe to use, my experience bears that out.
I repeat, the only problems evident are those that people have when trying to play pirate copies.

[RincewindTheWiz]

Sidney, simply repeating your belief that everyone who has problems with SF is a pirate is stupid, childish and really insulting to a lot of innocent people who didn't ask for this. There have been lots of known problems with SF, and actually damaging hardware is a new one for a copy protection, however rarely it happens. SF is a very aggressive copy protection and has caused lots of problems for lots of people, and potential damage to hardware is just a result of how far they go in their anti copying techniques.

The fact that you didn't have a problem with it is irrelevant, it does not in any way preclude other people having problems. Now I'm going to close this thread and let it be, if you want to continue your pro-SF propaganda please do it somewhere else where they appreciate it, like the official Starforce forums; you might get a few lines in between the pirate torrents for other companies' games posted by the official moderators there.