Ah Starforce... Lock-on: Modern Air Combat [first one] was Starforce IIR. XPand Rally, DCS Blackshark 1 too. Have DCS running fine with a crack thankfully.

In the early SF days my rig got totally hosed before I realized what was going on. And even after I discovered what was going on it took months to finally rid the system of the 'virus' since you were never sure just what games where infected, and even after you un-installed SF it would reappear if you had the bad luck to start up a sleeper SF game. A real nightmare and the company that produced it acted like complete snots if you tried to get help from them dealing with it. A computer game low point for sure.

ZellSF wrote:

I often wonder if the Starforce boycott was organized by the Securom people or something like that.

Not that I mind Starforce being gone, I just wish the boycott would move on to other equally shitty copy protections after it. Which it logically should have, if something else wasn't driving it...

Exactly what I think. Even because StarForce, at least and iirc managed for once to really do what a DRM ought to do: prevent pirates from playing.
I mean a year and half (with splinter cell: chaos theory) is something really remarkable.
Said this, I just my retail SC:CT is going to work next time I decide to reinstall it on my x64 windows

Gamecollector wrote:

Read this and this. Unfortunately 90% of US/EU starforce protected games use SF 3.3-3.7.16 and are incompatible with Windows 7 b […]
Show full quote

mirh wrote:

Are you sure?

Read this and this.
Unfortunately 90% of US/EU starforce protected games use SF 3.3-3.7.16 and are incompatible with Windows 7 because of this.
Of course the new MS "OS" is even more incompatible (versions before 4.5 will never work).

Bloody hell...... That's really a rip off.

tincup wrote:

Ah Starforce... Lock-on: Modern Air Combat [first one] was Starforce IIR. XPand Rally, DCS Blackshark 1 too. Have DCS running fine with a crack thankfully.

In the early SF days my rig got totally hosed before I realized what was going on. And even after I discovered what was going on it took months to finally rid the system of the 'virus' since you were never sure just what games where infected, and even after you un-installed SF it would reappear if you had the bad luck to start up a sleeper SF game. A real nightmare and the company that produced it acted like complete snots if you tried to get help from them dealing with it. A computer game low point for sure.

Could you elaborate?
What did it hose specifically?

@ mirh: What happened was that my hard drives were gradually working slower and slower, eventually reaching PIO speed [floppy drive speed]. By this time it was clear something weird was going on and I had begun trying to trouble shoot the system. First I just reset the drives to DMA in Device Manager but after a few days or a week they would gradually ratchet down mode by mode to PIO. It would take a minute to copy a small text file between drives. I ran diagnostics on the drives, ram, cpu, and decided it must be a problem with the motherboard controller and began to source a new board.

About then I started to search for information on symptoms/diagnosis of hard drive issues and stumbled across a thread about Starforce DRM. I instantly realized I had a few of the games under discussion installed so tried the recommended protocol of uninstalling the games and uninstalling SF - which is not unistalled by removing the games... PIO issue solved... Knowing that it wasn't a hardware issue was a relief but since I didn't yet know how many games I still had installed has SF, over the coming month(s) I had to routinely perform the protocol until I eventually got rid of the last SF game. Checking Device Manager for the tell tale signature of SF became a regular part of my maintenance routine.

Around this time one of the PC game mags - possibly PC Gamer - ran an article on SF and described in detail how to completely remove SF. In my case the optical drives functioned okay, or at least better than the hard drives.

The whole episode was very distasteful - lot's of online acrimony and bad blood and counter accusations from Starforce [and other pro DRM factions]about running pirated software etc. Starforce dev's started off by denying the problem existed, then after they had to admit it they slammed gamers by charging that only those running pirated copies of SF games had problems, so basically told everyone to F*@$ off. Infuriating after having been on the verge of rebuilding my system before I knew the real source of the problem.

Eventually I found a complete list of SF infected games and safely removed all that I had. I keep all my Starforce "protected" games stored in a lead clad stainless steel "time capsule" for future generations to experiment with...

I had similar problems with StarForce.
It destroyed a nearly new CD drive that had cost me $50.
I'd never heard of a game destroying a CD drive before.

I also had to reinstall Windows because the names of the files
in the lists of StarForce files I found weren't all the same as
the ones on my computer -- and deleting them didn't help
regain computer speed.

Max Payne 2 doesn't work out of the box unless you use a crack on it due to Securom, Windows 8.1.

Xpand Rally and Xpand Rally Xtreme have Starforce removed no CD versus out there, too.

tincup: you're literally the only person I've heard of with this problem. While it sucks, it's a very rare incompatibility with the Starforce driver and your hardware.

I'm sure the other driver-based copy protections has had their share of freak incompatibility problems too.

Of course problem with optical drives where common, but IIRC that was just a setting you could change back?

tincup wrote:

@ mirh: What happened was that my hard drives were gradually working slower and slower, eventually reaching PIO speed [floppy drive speed]. By this time it was clear something weird was going on and I had begun trying to trouble shoot the system. First I just reset the drives to DMA in Device Manager but after a few days or a week they would gradually ratchet down mode by mode to PIO. It would take a minute to copy a small text file between drives. I ran diagnostics on the drives, ram, cpu, and decided it must be a problem with the motherboard controller and began to source a new board.

Actually this sound like the old DMA reverts to PIO problem. I found some reference which link this to Starforce copy protection, but mostly for the CD/DVD drives, not the HD.
Anyway, I have encountered this problem a few times with hard disks and the fix I linked to helped in all cases.

ZellSF wrote:

other driver-based copy protections has had their share of freak incompatibility problems too.

Maybe.
Still you have "must reboot" after each new game/patch (well, SF 5.x at last can install drivers w/o rebooting), you have SF 3.x with "if you have an IDE drive - then use only this damn IDE drive" (partially fixed with Starforce Nightmare but not always work). Plus SF 1.x is incompatible even with WinXpSp2. Well, I don't know US/EU games with SF 1.x but some of my foreign russian games use it.

MechWarrior 4 Mercenaries (the original 2-CD versions, not the MekTek release) works on some systems, not on others. My last PC that was running Windows 7 ran the game fine. This one, however, gives me a hardware error on the first start, then CTDs, and after that, trying to start the game will cause more CTDs. 😵

Makes me glad I still have my Gateway with XP on it, it's nice to come back to that version from time to time.

ZellSF wrote:

tincup: you're literally the only person I've heard of with this problem. While it sucks, it's a very rare incompatibility with the Starforce driver and your hardware.

I'm sure the other driver-based copy protections has had their share of freak incompatibility problems too.

Of course problem with optical drives where common, but IIRC that was just a setting you could change back?

Yes, optical drives were the common problem but if you suffered from hard drive failure back then you would have found others with the same SF related issue. There was quite a bit of posting about it in the day. No doubt my optical drive was effected too but the hard drive issue overshadowed everything else.

It was on a 939 based system, 2x 200gb SATA1.5 Matrox HD's in RAID0, and 2x 7800GT in SLI, XP Home/sp2. For kicks I could re-build the rig pretty much as it was, install every SF game I own and see what happens 🤣

I got around to installing the GoG build of F.E.A.R on my Win8 computer and I get no quicksave glitches.

It's also pretty obvious it's a long time since last I played it. I remember this having trouble keeping 60 FPS at max detail, now the worst drops are down to 100 FPS (which is not noticeable with g-sync). I also remember it having loading times.

ZellSF wrote:

I got around to installing the GoG build of F.E.A.R on my Win8 computer and I get no quicksave glitches.

It's also pretty obvious it's a long time since last I played it. I remember this having trouble keeping 60 FPS at max detail, now the worst drops are down to 100 FPS (which is not noticeable with g-sync). I also remember it having loading times.

I already completed F.E.A.R and half of perseus mandate on W7x64.. It's the steam edition though.
I read retail had securom v7.. but iirc it's completely compatible with newer systems

Ive had a couple of games not work properly, Max Payne 1 & 2 for instance refused to run with the AMD drivers on Windows 7 , but worked fine with the Nvidia ones, or with the AMD ones under WinXP.

Otherwise its mostly glitches ranging from graphics , to crashing. I suspect that fairly soon problems will start appearing more often, hence why I got a Core2Duo based HP workstation, which runs anything from Max Payne to Bioshock very well (with the X1900 , it can probably run later games like Fallout 3 , but it won't be the fastest thing ever)

Bloodline (http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/bloodline) goes black screen in Windows 7

The only game at the top of my head that will not work is the disc copies of Beyond Good & Evil, they flat out REFUSE to install thanks to the game being riddled with copy protection. I can not remember which scheme it used, but I believe it was either Starforce or TAGES.

It's Tages.

I had to use the following to get it to work:
Installshield Cabinet file Viewer
Beyond Good & Evil Patch
NOCD

As well as adding the registry keys.

This was back in 2009.

Easier to use the GOG release nowadays.

I have American Mcgees Scrapland retail original and I've never been able to play it. Funny thing is even if I boot my PC into XP, I still can't get the **** Starforce to work. **** you Starforce. I can't find a working crack for it anywhere either.

BuckoA51 wrote:

I have American Mcgees Scrapland retail original and I've never been able to play it. Funny thing is even if I boot my PC into XP, I still can't get the **** Starforce to work. **** you Starforce. I can't find a working crack for it anywhere either.

Apparently the Italian version doesn't have Starforce. You could always try getting a copy of that version and then replacing the game data files with the American ones (with the exceptions of the Starforce protected ones of course, probably the executables). I had to do that with my copy of Fallout 3 a guy on Steam in Germany gave me, cause it was locked to German and censored a bunch. :X

BuckoA51 check your pm