StarForce problem

[Fraya]

To get back on topic and answer the original post, Starforce has always been notoriously difficult to bypass because it uses drivers, virtual devices and other nasty things to thwart pirates.. though I believe they have only succeeded in being a minor nuisance at best while destroying many peoples computers or killing performance (a story of SF drivers corrupting a guys hard drive comes to mind).

Older versions of SF are well documented and numerous ways to bypass it with no-cd exes have been found. Recently released programs though are coming with a brand new completely redesigned version of SF in them though.

As I said before it is notoriously hard to reverse engineer the SF software to find ways to bypass it.. I have a fairly decent knowledge of assembly language and Im at a loss as to where to even begin.. it even manages to hide the read/write requests for every address within the games memory space making it impossible to even create a trainer for the game.

Someone will figure it out eventually but in the meantime we're stuck having to use a combination of SFCure and SFNightmare to trick starforce into believing there are no IDE optical drives connected so it will look at the scsi drives created by deamon tools and alchohol 120 (which it cant tell is virtual).

[mahldcat]

Something I'm kind of curious about...reading about some of the fun stuff that Starforce could do to a machine...and also recalling a disucssion I had with a coworker about things like the secure computing initiative (palladium) and how hardware emulation could turn the entire SCI/Palladium idea on its head...wondered if there might be a way to get the game to run inside of an emulated environment like vmware.

I know where I work, the driver engineers used VMWAre extensively to develop and test, as you were able to freeze the machine in place and step through it (ala some of the debuggers like SoftIce etc)...and you had a very powerful rollback feature as well...

I don't have much experience in the low level assembler programming, but might this be a way to aid in reverse engineering Starforce?

...I'm also thinking about how a lot of the discussion is revolving around hacking the machine to hide the IDE drives...this process is very easy in VMWare, and is one of things I was thinking about...

Cheers,

Mahldcat

[IlijaPlayerP]

Hey guys i see you know these things.......so can somebody eMail me PLEASE!!! I don't know how to start World Racing 2 - It has a CD protection error... the StarForce Nightmare doesn't work (i don't know how to work with it ) So can somebody tell me how to turn on this game? I have completed the first part and now i want to complete the second, but........... Or can somebody send me a crack? on mail? PLS HELP!!!

[IvanDowesa]

buy the original game

[thebluegr]

@mahldctat: VMWare supports all these features as you say, but it doesn't support Direct3D yet. Only DirectDraw is supported, so unfortunately it's not an option yet