What I think about Starforce
 

Hi, I just wanted to use this place to comment on all those Starforce hatemail and boycott requests.

It is true and I fully agree, that a copy protection should never go that deep into you operating system (using own drivers) and in no case it should disallow other software running. I totally agree with you in that point.

But somehow I see even more people complaining about Starforce, because it seems to be the only copy protection that really works. It is actually the first copy protection that makes it (almost) impossible to play for people not owning the original. I bet half of the people here actually hate Starforce, because they can't play their downloaded games anymore. And I respect the developers of Starforce for their work. One could argue about the way they achieved that, but they did it.

Usually, publishers spent a lot of money on copy protection for one or two days until it was cracked, but Starforce changed this. So I ask you: Is all we can do about that is starting petitions, complaing again and again and celebrate each game which is not protected by Starforce? Why don't we just try to crack it like it's always been done? Where are all those skilled people? Do you really give up? When I look the web for Starforce reverse engineering papers or information, I can only find a few. Why is that? Nothing is impossible. If the software runs on your computer with the original, then you can make it work without the original. That's a fact. And that's what should be our point of interest. If we can't crack it alone, then maybe we have to work together and share what we found out about it.

Even if we get all the publishers to not use Startforce anymore, the day will come when there's a new protection, maybe even a "clean" one. Will we try to find some things in it that we disagree with, so that we can boycott it again? Or will we try to crack it?

First, most ppl don't like to do something on their own (they just want the friggin crack) and second, you really need some serious skills to deal with SF.
Yes, it can be cracked, but often it's just not worth the effort to crack a lousy game or two. It's a time consuming process, especially when dealing with pcodes and wanting a full crack (instead of doin some dirty patching to make it ignore the CD) Bah...this topic has be discussed over and over:rolleyes:

You don't have to start from the beginning for every game, it's enough when you find out once, how it works.

Then it will get changed in the next revision.

Its not that easy. But I agree, most who do complain are warez users.

I myself have never had a problem at all with SF.

To the point of SF installing API's then yes it does, but so does other protections and you dont see people complain about them ;)

Other protections API's have never caused any blue screens for me, limited my burn speed or caused any other trouble in the same way as SF have done.

Not to forget the performance loss caused by starforce because its such a 'heavy' protection.

With my bad experiences from the past I'll just stay away from starforce and buy other games instead. It will never get installed on my PC again. Not even when crack is avaible because that means I first have to install starforce, use the crack and then remove starforce. Not gonna happen.

SecuROM and Safedisk works fine though, never experienced any problem from any of them.

There's enough incompatible shit^H^H^H^Hsoftware on every (!) computer, so why add something that is very low level and, from an objective point of view, completely redundant, to increase compatibility problems even more?!

Also, it is not the developers of games but the publishers who are this blindly into copy protection. Most developers wouldn't care much about their games being pirated, as it also kind of advertizes their work. (Why is M$ software dominating the world so much? Partially because it hasn't been copy protected much and thus has been pirated world wide.) This is the same as with media DRM; musicians are not very much into it, publishers are! Some musicians hate it so much that they're willing to leave their publishers and publish their music on their own - e.g. via the Internet.

And what is the reason for copy protection? Corporate greed; the boss of the publisher company wouldn't be able to buy his fifth car every year, if the sales weren't high enough. And who gives a fuck^H^H^H^Hdamn about that?!

1 Month ban for swearing :D

Edited! :)