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l33t-g4m3r · Wed Mar 15, 2006 1:33 pm

dont know if this has already been posted..
but StarForce was linking illegal torrents, pretty ironic no?

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/03/15
http://www.gamespot.com/pages/news/stor ... 864&page=0
http://www.glop.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=298
http://www.shacknews.com/ja.zz?comments=41221
http://games.slashdot.org/games/06/03/11/2049230.shtml

Shintai · Wed Mar 15, 2006 1:48 pm

Starforce itself is ok. We can say we dont like it and so on.

However, their PR and marketing sucks big time. they call people with SF problems for wannabee crackers and now this. So its just a product to stay away from and not buy if on a CD or DVD. Also, with SF, dont change OS too much. 32bit->64bit->vista all 3 needs new updated patches from the GAME PUBLISHER for the game and starforce to work. So its a hell, compatible wise, specially if some game publisher dont wanna update its game for say, vista or 64bit Xp.

l33t-g4m3r · Wed Mar 15, 2006 2:15 pm

i thought they were shady enough with silently installing drivers on your system that causes problems with peoples computers, but this recent stuff takes the cake.

i have X3:Reunion and it seems like im never going to use it.
Im not re-installing it until i can find a way to keep that crap off my system, and play without the cd.

what ticks me off even more about that game(not starforces fault) was that when i got a copy of it from sam-goody, one of the cds was bad.
the company's acknowledged this as their fault, but wont send me a replacement cd. $%&$# :evil:

they told me to just use some friggin work-around.
and i can't return it either.
All i can say is that these companies sure arent getting me as a repeat customer.

derFunkenstein · Wed Mar 15, 2006 2:20 pm

l33t-g4m3r wrote:
sam-goody

And the Musicland group, which included Sam Goody and Suncoast Video, went under...the Suncoast in teh Peoria mall moved to a bigger location and then 6 weeks later had a closing clearance sale because the parent company bought the farm.

Shintai · Wed Mar 15, 2006 2:25 pm

l33t-g4m3r wrote:
i thought they were shady enough with silently installing drivers on your system that causes problems with peoples computers, but this recent stuff takes the cake.

Drivers yes, uncanny way yes, problems no. Mark from sysinternals did take alook at it. And there is nothing in starforce that will give you problems. Lets try and keep some real world facts seperated from the rumour mill.

Starforce got more than enough real world issues that makes it not wanted.

Stripe7 · Wed Mar 15, 2006 2:34 pm

I did read on some other forums that SF objects to older versions of SF on the same machine. ie you cannot have any older games with SF on your machine the same time you are playing your new SF DRM'ed game. Personally I have 10 game loaded on my machine and in a week play at least 4-5 of them. I hate having to switch CD ROMS when I do this which is fairly often. **REMOVED** I removed X3 from may machine as I was tired of waiting for frick'ing SF logo to go away every time I booted the game up before putting me into the game. No clue how good a game X3 was, I removed it from my machine because of SF and won't be putting in back in until **REMOVED**.

**EDIT BY MOD: see my post below. -Kevin**

Shintai · Wed Mar 15, 2006 2:40 pm

Stripe7 wrote:
I did read on some other forums that SF objects to older versions of SF on the same machine. ie you cannot have any older games with SF on your machine the same time you are playing your new SF DRM'ed game. Personally I have 10 game loaded on my machine and in a week play at least 4-5 of them. I hate having to switch CD ROMS when I do this which is fairly often. **REMOVED** I removed X3 from may machine as I was tired of waiting for frick'ing SF logo to go away every time I booted the game up before putting me into the game. No clue how good a game X3 was, I removed it from my machine because of SF and won't be putting in back in until **REMOVED**.

Ehm? If you have say, SF 3.7 drivers you can play all former SF games below that aswell. So thats FUD. But you need a patch to get say, Silent hunter III to work on vista or 64bit XP that they aint gonna make. And SF doesnt get uninstalled with the game.

**REMOVED** X3 did load fast, but other older SF games are like 1min to get past the SF protection.

**EDIT BY MOD: see my post below. -Kevin**

l33t-g4m3r · Wed Mar 15, 2006 2:45 pm

Shintai wrote:
l33t-g4m3r wrote:
i thought they were shady enough with silently installing drivers on your system that causes problems with peoples computers, but this recent stuff takes the cake.

Drivers yes, uncanny way yes, problems no. Mark from sysinternals did take alook at it. And there is nothing in starforce that will give you problems. Lets try and keep some real world facts seperated from the rumour mill.

Starforce got more than enough real world issues that makes it not wanted.

technically yes, and i dont know all the details but starforce on some systems causes the cdrom to run in pio mode which degrades performance and over time can damage the drive. so yes, starforce itself does not damage the computer, but it does LEAD to eventual damage. maybe newer versions fix that problem but i doubt it.

also, there are potential issues about how it runs code on your system through some sort of backdoor which bypasses the os restrictions.
kinda like how viruses take advantage of sony's drm, same here.

truthfully, i'd even like to see somebody make a virus that takes advantage of starforce, just because that might cause some people to realize how dangerous it is.

then again, maybe this current issue will be enough to slow them down.
who knows.
less games with it, the better.

Wed Mar 15, 2006 2:56 pm

technically yes, and i dont know all the details but starforce on some systems causes the cdrom to run in pio mode which degrades performance and over time can damage the drive. so yes, starforce itself does not damage the computer, but it does LEAD to eventual damage. maybe newer versions fix that problem but i doubt it.

It's an aggressive filter driver and in some cases that has lead to serious compatibility issues. Normally it's just that a burner or whatever stops working due to the software conflict. I have read the reports of it actually killing the drive, but never personally observed (that of course doesn't mean it's not true).

also, there are potential issues about how it runs code on your system through some sort of backdoor which bypasses the os restrictions.
kinda like how viruses take advantage of sony's drm, same here.

Starforce uses a Legacy I/O driver set. Legacy I/O drivers are ring 0 drivers and can provide ring 3 applications direct hardware access.

Direct hardware access is bad. This isn't really a backdoor though or bypassing the OS. It is a part of Windows, even if a bad one.

XP64 and Vista64 no longer support Legacy I/O drivers.

Shintai · Wed Mar 15, 2006 2:59 pm

l33t-g4m3r wrote:
technically yes, and i dont know all the details but starforce on some systems causes the cdrom to run in pio mode which degrades performance and over time can damage the drive. so yes, starforce itself does not damage the computer, but it does LEAD to eventual damage. maybe newer versions fix that problem but i doubt it.

also, there are potential issues about how it runs code on your system through some sort of backdoor which bypasses the os restrictions.
kinda like how viruses take advantage of sony's drm, same here.

truthfully, i'd even like to see somebody make a virus that takes advantage of starforce, just because that might cause some people to realize how dangerous it is.

Seriously, get over it or read abit before posting crap and FUD.
Saying CD drives running in PIO mode damages the drive? So we have constantly damaged CD drives for atleast 10 years? Also SF dont turn your drive fra DMA to PIO mode. Thats BS. Prove it or stop the FUD.

About the driverinstall, ye thats true. But thats a generel issue, Sony silently adds rootkits, some securerom versions add drivers, same with soem AV vendors and the like. Its not SF specific, but a broad problem.

So try come up with proff next time.

l33t-g4m3r · Wed Mar 15, 2006 3:09 pm

Ryu Connor wrote:
Starforce uses a Legacy I/O driver set. Legacy I/O drivers are ring 0 drivers and can provide ring 3 applications direct hardware access.

Direct hardware access is bad. This isn't really a backdoor though or bypassing the OS. It is a part of Windows, even if a bad one.

XP64 and Vista64 no longer support Legacy I/O drivers.

i thought it was something like that, i didnt know that part about windows, but it cant be good either way.

besides that, i wont even be able to run x3 later since i was planning on installing win64 once all the drivers for my system become available.
pretty much only waiting on printer drivers.

Shintai wrote:
Seriously, get over it or read abit before posting crap and FUD.
Saying CD drives running in PIO mode damages the drive? So we have constantly damaged CD drives for atleast 10 years? Also SF dont turn your drive fra DMA to PIO mode. Thats BS. Prove it or stop the FUD.

About the driverinstall, ye thats true. But thats a generel issue, Sony silently adds rootkits, some securerom versions add drivers, same with soem AV vendors and the like. Its not SF specific, but a broad problem.
So try come up with proff next time.

lol, like i know exactly how it works, its not like the sourcecode has been released and harmful code's been found, but theres been reports all over the internet about it. read some of them.
why do i have to prove it to you when it's already been documented by numerous amounts of people?
I'm not a reverse engineer, dont ask me to explain it, read their accounts for yourself, and if you find every single one to be a lie, then you might have something.
otherwise its 500+ people's word vs yours.

Stripe7 · Wed Mar 15, 2006 3:22 pm

Does the SF software run as a background process even if you are not running the game? One problem I had while I had X3 installed was that it was taking my machine several minutes to shutdown. Once I removed X3 it now shuts down in a few seconds. I was blaming SF for this, but if it is not SF's then I need to track down what is taking WinXp so long to shut down.

leor · Wed Mar 15, 2006 3:26 pm

anyone read the gamespot review?

Brad Wardell is freaking awesome.

l33t-g4m3r · Wed Mar 15, 2006 3:28 pm

Stripe7 wrote:
Does the SF software run as a background process even if you are not running the game? One problem I had while I had X3 installed was that it was taking my machine several minutes to shutdown. Once I removed X3 it now shuts down in a few seconds. I was blaming SF for this, but if it is not SF's then I need to track down what is taking WinXp so long to shut down.

it installs as a driver. uninstalling x3 doesnt uninstall SF afaik, so it probably isnt SF unless it actually did uninstall it.
SF usually requires its own uninstaller to get rid of it.
Sounds like you might possibly have spyware on your system, try scanning with spybot or the microsoft anti-spyware program.
try running disk defragmenter, that might help too.

Wed Mar 15, 2006 3:30 pm

I'm going to move this to the Gaming forum.

I'd also like to draw attention to both forum rule #1 and the rules for the gaming forum. Posts talking about no-cd cracks are treading on violating those rules.

Kevin

Shintai · Wed Mar 15, 2006 3:37 pm

l33t-g4m3r wrote:
besides that, i wont even be able to run x3 later since i was planning on installing win64 once all the drivers for my system become available.

X3 works fine on x64 with SF. SF 3.5+ or so is x64 compatible.

And if you check most of the "issues". Its mainly whines and cries over SF wasnt cracked for a long time. Now it is tho and all the cries is gone. What a funny colide of events.

l33t-g4m3r · Wed Mar 15, 2006 3:42 pm

Shintai wrote:
l33t-g4m3r wrote:
besides that, i wont even be able to run x3 later since i was planning on installing win64 once all the drivers for my system become available.

X3 works fine on x64 with SF. SF 3.5+ or so is x64 compatible.

i was kinda wondering if they updated it.
good to know if i ever felt like installing the game again when i upgrade to 64.
since its a pain to install using the bad-cd workaround, I'll probably just wait to see if they ever release an official SF free exe like they did with X2 though.

VTNC · Fri Mar 17, 2006 5:12 pm

Stripe7 wrote:
Does the SF software run as a background process even if you are not running the game?

Like Ryu said

It's an aggressive filter driver

Emphasis on driver.

Normally your computer works like this:

software <=> driver <=> hardware

This is a model of the software making calls to the hardware through the system's driver's. The driver is the intermediary, translating commands from the software to the hardware and feedback from the hardware to the software.

When you have SF installed, you have SF as an intermediary, so it's ALWAYS "ON". Since most SF enabled games don't uninstall SF, you usually have it on EVEN AFTER YOU UNINSTALLED THE GAME.

The least of problems you'll have because of this are:

Lag
Play some hardware-intensive game. Alt+Tab back to Windows. Time it to see how long it takes.
Now install SF and repeat the process above.
In which instance does it take longer to Alt+Tab?
3rd-party/vendor drivers
This is a personal challenge to Shintai himself, so pay attention:
Go to your motherboard vendor's page. Download their motherboard drivers. Install these drivers. Now let's see how "Starforce itself is ok."
Especially fun with nForce hardware.

Bottom line is this: we invest time and money creating the best machines we can afford to comfortably play the games we want. It is unnacceptable to have some artificial handicap to the performance of said machine just because some paranoid suit a$$hole doesn't know it would be better to take measures to boost sales, rather than take measures to thwart people who wouldn't buy their software in the first place.

It is time they understand that the machine on which their software is being installed on does not belong to them, it belongs to its user.

If you would like to take action AGAINST publishers who employ SF as its protection scheme, here are two things you can do

Publishers who employ starforce are (usually) self-serving a$$holes who are unable to listen to their consumers. If you try open dialog, be it on their forums or SF's forums, you'll just be disregarded as a "cracker".

Money talks, so instead of trying to directly get in contact with the publisher, just boycott games with SF. A list can be found on the address to which my sig links.
If you ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO HAVE a game with SF, then buy it.

But when you're done with it, SELL IT. Sell it for half-price TOPS.

This "steals" a sale from the publishers. And at the price you're selling, its new owner is more likely to also sell the game.

PS > Stop linking to cracks, folks. You should know better :-?

Shintai · Fri Mar 17, 2006 6:11 pm

Personal challenge?

I have Intel chipset drivers and I got SF 3.6 on.

It runs fine, it doesnt blacklist my daemon tools or curerom and I burn CDs and DVD s fine.

http://80.167.217.210/pics/sf.jpg

SF is an aggresive IDE filter and monitor and it only starts filtering and monitoring when the SF application ask for it. Nothing else, it doesn´t ruin your system, make it slower or anything else. Hell sure the 25KB I use on memory on it, got me there. But you gotta settle facts and fiction.

Btw, nForce drivers+hardware doesnt even run right without SF on it.

Publishers who employ starforce are (usually) self-serving a$$holes who are unable to listen to their consumers. If you try open dialog, be it on their forums or SF's forums, you'll just be disregarded as a "cracker".

With X3, I saw quite alot of people getting help and got it to work. Sure there is exeptions and overall they give out bad help, but dont try and put it as oneway only. SF already got enough real world things that makes it undesireable for usage. The compability issues with driver changes is one of them, specially when we jump so massively between driver models from x86 windows to x64 windows and soon Vista´s new drivermodel.
Then adding their marketing measures along with the game they play against MS with the driverinstalls. What you wanna notice here is the drivers aint signed and the user aint warned. Along with that, starforce itself requires administrative rights to be installed. So thats another step backwards.

meanfriend · Fri Mar 17, 2006 6:32 pm

IMHO, I dont give a crap if starforce currently runs problem free or not.

A game has absolutely no business installing it's own system level drivers, especially ones that serve no purpose other than trying to enforce copy protection. If you are okay with starforce drivers, then you shouldnt mind if every different game you own requires installing it's own proprietary driver.

To steal from VTNC's post , instead of :

software <=> driver <=> hardware

you'll get :

software <=> driver1 <=> driver2 <=> driver3 <=> driver4 <=> driver5 <=> driver7 <=> driver(n) <=>hardware

Can you reasonably expect proper operation with a jungle of competing drivers like that? How the heck would you troubleshoot anything with a soup like that? The only drivers that belong on your system are the ones *you* want there, and no other. Game companies mucking around with weird sectors on the media, or online authentication, is one thing. But stay the 'eff away from the low level operation of people's machines.

Consumers need to draw the line at some forms of copy protection, and starforce has pole-vaulted over it IMHO.

Shintai · Fri Mar 17, 2006 6:43 pm

No thats actually wrong.

You get software <+> driver <+> hardware
I want ascii forum<+> driver <+>

Its basicly parallel and not serial. Your network drivers are one of those with most parallel drivers attached. Your IDE/SCSI driver also already got quite a few.

But if you aint familiar, when you install daemon tools, curerom etc. You do the same thing.

You have alot of drivers in your system that aint hardware related. Your AV is a driver, your firewall is a driver, alot of network services is in drivers and so on.

But I agree, anything that needs extra install, specially drivers is very bad.
Starforce concerns me, but not as much as Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Specially since these will become game platform later on. Take your starforce drivers, replace this with HARDWARE in your GFX card and in your monitor. Its just yet another step. If it was security to protect me, fine. But we talk about something like video here. And when you wanna make a backup, you gonna get online with Sony or Thoshiba so they can authorize.

Krogoth · Fri Mar 17, 2006 8:21 pm

I failed to understand why the hell do publishers even need to utillize copyright schemes like Starforce or even more intrustive ones that may come down the road.

Priacy should be viewed as "cost of doing business". IMO, copy protection should be sufficent enough to thrawd the casual priates and early release guys. It should not attempt to interfere with the general function of the end user's system.

The guys at ID and Epic have the right idea of requiring a CD-check for the release version, but later deactivtied it with the first or second patch. They also make it somewhat difficult to make a copy of the game, but not enough to stop the hardcore priates who normally wouldn't buy their products.

Forge · Fri Mar 17, 2006 8:30 pm

Actually, Daemon Tools doesn't talk to any hardware, so leave them out of your kettle banging, kk?

Shintai · Sat Mar 18, 2006 7:54 am

Forge wrote:
Actually, Daemon Tools doesn't talk to any hardware, so leave them out of your kettle banging, kk?

I never said it did. But its still a driver and works the same way as SF in terms of attached.

Forge · Sat Mar 18, 2006 2:21 pm

Shintai wrote:
Forge wrote:
Actually, Daemon Tools doesn't talk to any hardware, so leave them out of your kettle banging, kk?

I never said it did. But its still a driver and works the same way as SF in terms of attached.

Again, no. DT does not attach to other dirvers, it attaches only to it's own emulated hardware.

VTNC · Sat Apr 01, 2006 12:56 am

For anyone still unconvinced, you can find information about the fake website StarForce set up to convince consumer that it's all right or the class action suit against UbiSoft adding StarForce to its games.

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