For my figures its just that 1day for very simple encryptions (like still life) to 4+ years for the harder ones (perhaps splinter cell ct). Lets give an example if you try to break a zip file of a 12 letter password it could take more then 1 year with a average pc 3.0 ghz 1 gig ram, now take a encryption key that could be huge 20+ chars it can take a very long time or forever if evey file is encrypted differnt.
Some not all starforce games have trigger points (most are online checks) but so far this is only seen in codemasters games.

Please prove me wrong if you can.

Well,

I havent looked a lot at starforce, but I gotta ask you this:

Have you ever heard of manual unpacking?

As for the online checks, those things are implemented by the developers I think, not by starforce... I'm not sure about that...

i think starforce is a nightmare
there are those of us who will buy games
and maybe download games that we would never buy anyway [eg, cos we are not into those types of games].
but when the protection stops me playing a game that i actually bought then it is going too far
das

depends on the method used to break the zip password (using hashing tables can sygnificantly speed things up).. 20+ chars sure, that'll take long too, all depends on your method, the time taken totally depends on the method/approach, if it took the crackers 4 years per game there'd be no gamecopyworld now would there.. and the games protections are reportedly 'very high industry standard protections' by most articles today, yet they are bypassed.. as for trigger points... codemasters are paranoid and did other things too (remember fade?.. ) so thats a particularly bad example ;)
i would prove you wrong, but im not into pissing contests and it will detract from the thread, i wouldnt say you are totally wrong, just misinformed about some things which you cite as examples

don´t know.rule is, when you don´t know do it for safety reasons. If you have some more time try both to find out. I would install from the image only because its faster and less trouble. Also, if there is anything like starforce creating a serial or wahtever I´d have better chances when using the image!?

Euro version. It doesn´t matter at all as far as I´m concerned...

i cant get the backup to work for ufo aftershock :( even with that sfnightmare? keeps saying put cd in anther drive i have deamon tool 4 to

Read the FAQ on how to make cracks work.

same here. i sent mine back. swapped it for some bloody awful game called gun.
****ehawks

Too much emphasis is being put on running games from images.
Isn't the point to run from a backup?

Well that's exactly what I did with SCCT, I'm not using DT4 as it wouldn't install on my new system, I'm not using anything except my DVD drive which BTW is a Pioneer 106 and connected vie IDE.
Yes I know that's not new but it was spare and I didn't see the point in buying a new drive for it.

Today, hardware virtualization is getting more and more serious and popular. (See the new x86/x64 CPU's with built in virtualization support.) Running a game off a disk image file, rather than a physical disk, is also one form of hardware virtualization. And unlike the other forms, it makes execution actually even faster!

Starforce cracking
 

Is there a way to stop a driver from being installed? Could you create your own driver and have it scan or blacklist the starforce driver? The whole reason starforce works is because of the privileges it gets from having low level drivers installed. There must be a way to stop drivers from installing. The driver mess is exactly why windows sucks and malware can have its way with our computers. Rootkits and underhanded crap run rampant on windows machines. If my program could be installed with driver access I could have my way with anyones computer 2.

NEVER LAUNCH the Starforce-protected game (you can find out the protection with latest version of ProtectionID and/or A-Ray Scanner), and then the damn drivers won't get installed. But you won't be able to play the game either, unless you have a no-CD/DVD patch (not a mini/maxi/full image!). ;)

Some people on this forum already stated that they buy a game only when a confirmedly working no-CD/DVD patch is available.