How to avoid getting hosed by Starforce copy protection?

April 6, 2006 12:40 PM

Starforce copy protection: Threat or menace?

I recently purchased, but have not yet installed, a game (GT Legends) using Starforce copy protection. Due to all the recent negative publicity surrounding Starforce, I'm a little hesitant to install it. What ways are there to minimize the potential damage to my system?

posted by arto to computers & internet (12 comments total)

Install the game normally. Run one of the many StarForce driver removal tools. Then download and install a no-CD/DVD crack from GameCopyWorld.com. I do it all the time, I believe it gets rid of StarForce effectively and you no longer have to use a disc.
posted by geoff. at 12:58 PM on April 6, 2006

Starforce will allegedly over time sometimes cause optical drives to "step down" to PIO mode, which at the very best degrades their performance, and at the very worst can cause longer-term problems. There's also apparently some potential security exploits from it having such base rootkit-level access to things, but they apparently haven't been hit yet.

Also, the company's idea of good public relations hasn't quite yet moved to the level of stabbing puppies in the eyes, but give them a year or two more. Baby steps.

If you've had it on your system for awhile, you can check your drives' status by going to device manager, drilling down to your IDE/ATAPI devices listing, right clicking on the primary and secondary IDE channels and going into properties/advanced properties. The mode should be DMA. If so, rejoice! It hasn't harmed you. (Following geoff.'s advice is still sound, because if nothing else, even the potential is a good thing to avoid. Plus, if your organizational skills are like mine, finding a cd can be a hassle sometimes, and what gamer has the attention span for that? :) )

If it has been switched to PIO, the easiest way to get things working again is to uninstall the primary and secondary IDE channels and then reboot. Windows should redetect properly on boot-up, and they'll be in DMA again.

Again, it's easiest to simply never let it get to that point by keeping it off your system. It's a low-percentage chance, but who needs it?
posted by Drastic at 1:41 PM on April 6, 2006

Thanks, geoff, but GameCopyWorld doesn't show a no-CD .exe for that particular game. I was able to find information on how to trick StarForce into authenticating a backup/ISO copy of the CD (which isn't overly helpful--I do have a retail CD) but nothing on running the game without StarForce present at all.
posted by arto at 1:47 PM on April 6, 2006

Your best bet would be to wait for a crack or patch, and not touch the game until then. Or just consider your system already comprimised and install your game, play it, then format the drive and start from scratch.

I don't mean to sound like a pain in the ass, but I didn't put crappy malware in your game. Maybe you should write the people that did.
posted by bh at 2:21 PM on April 6, 2006

Can your BIOS boot off an external USB drive? It might be worthwhile to install a system on a cheap external drive and use that as your "dirty" system on which you play games.
posted by mr_roboto at 2:43 PM on April 6, 2006

A no-cd patch will likely be a long time coming. It took at least 6 months for a patch to come out for Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, which uses Starforce. Usually no-cd patches come out the day the game does.

I bought it a while ago and played through it. Since then, I've had to reinstall windows (not because of Starforce - just windows in general). Last week I tried installing it again and it just won't work. The procedure for for running it without the cd is a huge pain in the ass, so I've just given up. The fact that it was *not* put out by one of the major cracking groups doesn't point to them cracking any other Starforce protected games soon.
posted by easyasy3k at 2:47 PM on April 6, 2006

Yeah, it's bad, the company who makes it has done things like:

A) When another game that DIDN'T use Starforce was selling very, very well (Stardock's Galactic Civilizations 2), they linked on their forums to live torrents of the game for download;
B) They make loud claims about how it's the "Russian Mafia" that's "out to get them", and that no sane person would have a problem with their wonderful utility;
C) People who DO have problems are routinely derided as 'beginning hackers' if they ask for help on their forums;
D) They invented a completely spurious 'security company' that says that Starforce is totally okay, perfectly safe. The company was invented out of whole cloth, and was hosted on the Starforce company's webserver.

As Drastic says, they're not quite up to eating babies on live TV, but it's only a matter of time. I certainly wouldn't trust code they wrote. It's quite obvious that lying and cheating are not moral issues for them, so why should you believe their claims that their software is harmless?
posted by Malor at 2:49 PM on April 6, 2006

My answer would be to not buy that game. If you're already bought it, see if you can take it back, giving Starforce as your reason.

If you're stuck, I don't know what to say. Having Starforce on my system is utterly unacceptable to me. It very well can cause problems other than degraded CD performance, for the very reason of its function: it prevents use of some CD recording and emulation software. It causes system instability the same way any poorly-written driver can bring down your system. And, of course, there's that whole moral issue.

In my experience, by the way, sometimes Windows will step down a drive, or spontaneously forget it exists, regardless of Starforce being on your machine or not. That's a separate, but long-standing (dates back to Windows 95) problem, and I've experienced it on three different systems, with three completely different software and hardware configurations.
posted by JHarris at 3:21 PM on April 6, 2006

Now I'm worried. I buy and play a lot of games, but I don't know if one of them has installed this crap on my systemor not. . . how do I find out if I'm a Starforce victim? Not just whether it has munged my DVD drive, but whether it is there at all?
posted by The Bellman at 3:33 PM on April 6, 2006

Boycott Starforce has all the detection/removal tools and advice you'll likely need, The Bellman - it's worth checking even if none of the games you've bought have come with it, since it's being stuffed into a depressing number of demos now, too, on the basis that developers are getting paranoid about no-CD patches/fixed executables for full versions of games being created from the demo exe.

arto, I've had a really good look around the usual places and I can't find a no-cd or workaround for GT Legends anywhere, which is unusual and disappointing - sorry to say it, but it looks like there really isn't any way to play this without Starforce installed right now. The official GT Legends site has what it claims is a fix for some crash problems with Starforce, but obviously nothing to remove the inherent problems with the malware itself. Hmph.
posted by terpsichoria at 4:25 PM on April 6, 2006

Yes, StarForce is a menace. Copy protection software has no right to be installed as a device driver. (At least, until Trusted Computing / Palladium when we'll have no choice. Ugh). I'm afraid there's no way around installing StarForce if you really want to play the game. You could remove it when you're done playing the game. The official uninstaller does work, despite the sort of creepy distribution by a third party. You may have to manually reset your CD drives to DMA mode though if they've been stepped down to PIO.

Bellman; the canonical site for information about StarForce includes instructions on detecting StarForce and removing it.

Is it really true that StarForce games take longer to crack? That would be interesting news. I see there are copies of the game in question on bittorrent sites, but no idea if they're real copies or playable.
posted by Nelson at 4:26 PM on April 6, 2006

You don't even NEED to crack a Starforce game to play it. All you do is unplug any IDE drives in your system, and you can then play from a 'SCSI' drive... including imagers like Daemon Tools.

So not only does it mess your system up, it doesn't even _work_.
posted by Malor at 4:34 PM on April 6, 2006