Infamous 2 Full PC Game.ISO.32
Sacha Weakland
After my most recent squabble with that infamous "Digital Rights Management" system, Yours Trully decided to check if any other games for Windows were MALIGNED (Yup; That pun was deliberately intended.) by that poor excuse of an "anti-piracy system". As expected, my search brought me to the following list of PC games and simulators that contained it in one way or another.
So here's what happened so far:
After downloading my copy of World Racing 2 from the My Abandonware site -with the update patches sourced from The Patches-Scrolls as usual-, Installed everything religiously and played eagerly thorough the first missions (that was a few days back, of course). Upon restarting my machine early this morning.......
It greeted me with an 0xc00000428 error code (Driver Signature Error), which almost forced me to fully reload the OS. Fortunately, i was able to issue a Driver Signature Bypass (F7 key IIRC) command thorough the Recovery Options Menu to make it boot into the desktop as intended and get rid of the culprit ASAP. (Thank goodness for Microsoft Bing. It saved me from an impending doom!)
Now that you know the details of my adventure with StarF*^%, here's the aformentioned list as retrieved from the Wayback Machine:
(Please feel free to update it as needed; This one was originally compiled back in Mid-2006)
If I recall, it made it's way onto a bunch of "Value Software" releases of older, popular and not so popular games that basically wouldn't run because of the DRM constipation. A bunch of those probably got ripped and put on to the various game downloading sites, so you're likely to run into them sooner or later. I bought a copy of the Star Wars strategy game "Empire At War" at Staples, where that was the case and I never got it to work.
It greeted me with an 0xc00000428 error code (Driver Signature Error), which almost forced me to fully reload the OS. Fortunately, i was able to issue a Driver Signature Bypass (F7 key IIRC) command thorough the Recovery Options Menu to make it boot into the desktop as intended and get rid of the culprit ASAP
is the standard thing that Windows does when you attempt to load an unsigned (for that OS) boot-start driver, which, unfortunately, the StarForce driver is. The remedy (boot with signature enforcement disabled or "last good known configuration" and remove/replace the driver) is also an official, documented procedure.
Unfortunately, the problem is exactly the fact that you can install it that easily. The installer installs a driver and registers a service using standard Windows installer APIs. But in the next boot, the signature enforcement refuses to load it, and since the driver is marked as "boot-critical", the system crashes.
SF poses a special challenge to Wine too, because there just isn't any way to imitate a ring0 driver in Wine. Iow, these titles won't work at all.
Btw it seems this thing is even included in some of the old game demos! Without the CD-check of course, but the kernel driver is there.
Use VM then ? I was able to run 2 StarForce infested game demos, GT Legends and Xpand Rally, on QEMU. The DRM does not seem to care about running on virtual machine. With snapshot capability on the OS image, the StarForce DRM drivers can't mess with the OS at all.
I've ran GT Legends (The EUR release from Atari that is; The Viva Media US-NTSC version was plagued with the #StarFuss thingy IIRC. ) on my current Windows 10 machine on Win XP SP3 compatibility without any problems, mods and everything. It was a pretty good game with some slightly flawed physics engine. If memory serves me well, there was an old forum entry at the defunct NoGrip Racing website depicting the MAJOR issues that such game release caused on computers running the most recent versions of Windows (including the aforementioned Fatal Error Code for starters) and how to get those issues sorted out.
Here's said forum thread as retrieved from the Wayback Machine. It includes instructions for the -old- Steam release as well.
(I'm suspecting that it was the Atari distributed version with Steam's proprietary DRM thrown in for good measure. #PleaseConfirm)
Not sure if SafeDisc uses any kernel drivers? (EDIT: Yup, seems it does)
As kjliew mentioned, this problem can be overcome with virtual machines/emulation, but Wine is only for things living in userspace (at least, for now).
The disc checks aren't necessarily a problem because the host system's drives are visible in Wine.
That's right on the money. The last version of SafeDisc includes its own driver into the main installer, giving it instant elevated access to the machine's internals in the process, which poses a major security flaw as it would wreck some serious malware-induced havoc.
I believe all forms of sophisticated disc based DRM schemes (SafeDisc/SecureROM/StarForce etc.) will have troubles with Wine. Unless they were replaced with online-based DRM or completely alleviated by later patches/re-releases or cracked non-legitimately by underworld fans/hackers, there is no way to play them otherwise. StarForce claimed to be "un-crack-able" compared to SafeDisc/SecureROM, so any games which were infested would require the courtesy of publishers/studios to release patches/re-releases that endorsed the removal of DRMs. I think Wine is also problematic with games that simply do CD check, but those kinds of copy-protection can be easily circumvented.
For archiving purposes, I think the details on how to archive the CD images properly such that ISO or CUE/BIN rips would be able to pass SafeDisc/SecureROM/StarForce DRM check on VMs is very useful, if such was even remotely possible.
StarForce claimed to be "un-crack-able" compared to SafeDisc/SecureROM, so any games which were infested would require the courtesy of publishers/studios to release patches/re-releases that endorsed the removal of DRMs.
My early retail copy of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time doesn't have StarForce (and Warrior Within is DRM free, I remember being able to rip/copy the CDs without any issue). The Two Thrones however is. I know the retail copy I bought in the month it released wouldn't run on Windows 7.
Early releases of Sands of Time and Warrior Within had SafeDisc worldwide and StarForce in Russia. Early releases of Two Thrones had StarForce worldwide. I have played a cracked "repack" shortly after the game came out. That's how I know that StarForce games were, in fact, crackable (apparently on a game-by-game basis).
Later DVD releases (like those that were released in the bundles) were a toss-up - some were DRM-free, some still had SafeDisc/StarForce.
And interestingly, the Russian release of Prince of Persia (2008) also was StarForce-protected, although worldwide it was always DRM-free. At least it's a new version of StarForce, which can run on any Windows up to 10, 64-bit included.
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