beating Starforce

[pirimeister]

Hi guys!
I was wondering if you could give some help regarding Starforce. You see, I bough the add-on for the flight sim Lock-On, Flaming Cliffs and had it instaled in my previous rig. It comes with Starforce (not sure which version, though) and as you could expect, messd my system up.

At first everything seemd ok, but my dvd drive started having problems reading and burning DVDs, until it just failed everytime I tried to use it to burn anything. After some googling, I found out that it was probably due to the Starforce copy protection. And if I needed any extra proof, my "flight buddy" who also bought the game has those exact same problems, that begun at the same time.

Anyway, I'm upgrading my PC and I was thinking about trying to beat this damm Starforce (that seems to harm legitimate buyers, more than preventing piracy...). My idea is to install Flaming Cliffs, with Starforce, and then buy a new DVD driver to replace the old one and install it new drivers over whatever the Starforce drivers mess up.

Do you think this is of any good? Or wil I be facing the same results further down the road? It really annoys me that I can't play something I paid for, specially with it being such a great game.

Any info on this would be greatly apreciated!

Thanks in advance,
Piri

[skywalker06]

use a program from this page to detect which starforce version the exe uses
http://www.gameburnworld.com/cdridentifyingtools.shtml
good one is Protection ID

Starforce has its own driver and dosnt overwrite the CD\DVD drives it should only load the driver when launching the game to detect if the CD\DVD is original or fake or should do but maybe you should update you CD\DVD drivers because maybe theres a conflict with the drivers you using now and starforce

[pirimeister]

Thanks for your help. I've followed your advice and updated the drivers for my DVD (the ones it was working with were really old, I've found out) and installed the game.

I'm still suspicious of what might happen further along, but went for it anyway.

Thanks again.
Piri

[skywalker06]

Also to make Starforce 3 "copies" work make the backup copy (Alcohol is best)than play them through external CD\DVD Drives heard this info on a another forum think cdfreaks.com ???

don't know how it works but i heard playing backups by using external CD\DVDs seems to fool their protection