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There's one thing that I have noticed all these years in support forums, and it sucks. When a person finds the sollution to his/her problem, he/she rarely posts to say how he/she managed to bypass/solve the problem, thus helping others, though he/she him/herself asked the help of the forum's members in the first place. Since I hate that habbit, here's how I got the game to play.
Apparently the problem was not the starforce protection, which I bypassed quite easily; by unplugging the power cord from my DVD-RW drive and mounting the image of the first cd -which I created with alcohol- on deamon tools 4 (I don't know if it matters, but I used only one virtual drive and all emulation options off). Both mini images found on gamecopyworld work as well.
The problem was that, as I stated in my previous post, windows forced the pc to reboot just before the main menu screen appeared. By snooping around on the net, I found a 1.1 patch which corrected some things, one of them being incompatibility with some amd processors (such as mine). However, to my great despair, the patch would not install itself. I got a 1628 error. After some more snooping around, I discovered that this was the American version of the patch, and that it wouldn't work on European versions of the game. I was about to give up, when I noticed a post where a fellow suggested that I should use software gfx and disable sound. Plus, I should disable the firewall. I went offline and disabled the firewall (zone alarm). I then opened the game's setup screen (it opens before the game loads). There was no option for software 3d acceleration, so I just minimized the gfx settings as much as possible (800X600 res, no antialising and no shadows). I couldn't disable the sound either, so I chose "SBLIVE" instead of the default "primary sound driver" option from the drop down list. And then I started the game. And it worked!
I don't know which of the above actions made it, but now it works!
Sorry for the big post, I just had to be as thorough as possible because someone else may face the same problem.
To the point, it seems that if you have dt4 and the will to unplugg your physical drives, it is very easy to bypass the starforce3 protection of the game.
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