Cracking Starforce history?

[Episodio1]

Hi!

I've been told first game with Starforce 3 (Splinter Chaos) was cracked 1 year after release.

I'd like to know the full story about how they cracked Securom proctecion (not in the technical sense).
Did they know they were dealing with a virtual machine since beginning?
Did groups work together?
What were the most difficult steps?

Is Securom the same as StarForce?

I've been searching but I haven't found anyrhing about it. Only "StarForce 3 Reverse-Engineering Tools * RELOADED"


Thanks.

[TippeX]

this simply leads to another question - why the interest?
in my experience some groups worked together, some didn't, difficult steps in reversing a vm are figuring out exactly what is going on (some teams are better at this than others) and then reversing it back to x86 code (for a clean crack), or abusing the vm so it does the work for the cracked version (which some teams do)..
securom is not the same as starforce, starforce uses drivers to do some things, which made it a bit trickier to crack (due to the ring 0 stuff)

as for dealing with a virtual machine since the beginning, to anyone who is skilled enough to crack the protections, it is pretty easy to determine what is x86 code and what isn't so yes, spotting vmusage to a trained eye is not hard.

[Episodio1]

Thanks.

I've just finished learning x86 assembly in university and I was surfing the internet to know how hard current code is respecto to my basic knowledge. I was shocked when I found many posts about that Splinter Cell game. ^^

edit: I've just seen RELOADED's nfo (first group releasing crack) and they dont say anything about the long cracking process or about groups helping each other.

[Joe Forster/STA]

Originally Posted by TippeX

as for dealing with a virtual machine since the beginning, to anyone who is skilled enough to crack the protections, it is pretty easy to determine what is x86 code and what isn't so yes, spotting vmusage to a trained eye is not hard.

You mean a sequence of valid x86 code - mostly ending in a CALL, RET or similar - and some obvious garbage behind it? Non-fully cleaned SecuROM code also contains intentional garbage, with lots of jumps around, to make disassembly and plain visual understanding of the code harder.

[TippeX]

well, a trained eye can read the code and spot obfuscation, but yup, i should have mentioned that

[Viatorex]

the first one was TOCA 2 as i remeber.problem with starforce was that even legal user was having problem with using oryginals