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I loved that player, too. In fact, you sparked a moment of nostalgia. If you have one as well, download here: http://www.glop.org/sonique/

It still works, even on Windows 8 x64. Now I will say that it doesn't work WELL...and by that, I mean that you have to run the installer in compatibility mode for Win95, and batch-adding songs into a playlist is an excercise in patience. Also, the default visualization plug-ins don't look so hot on modern displays since they don't scale much past 640x480 I don't think...but they get stupid fast framerates. All of that said, I'm pleasantly surprised that a program designed to work on Windows 95 was coded sufficiently well to still work on Windows 8; there are relatively few that do.

As for why it did poorly (answering one of the other responses), I think that my nostalgia trip answers that, too: The program was originally designed in an era where a 200MHz processor and 32MB of RAM was a generous complement of hardware. The program, on a 3.2GHz Core i7 with 12GB of RAM *still* took nearly ten seconds to start. You don't win people's hearts when a music player takes as much time to load as Photoshop, especially when Winamp was able to be up and running in 3 seconds or less on similar hardware.

I was, however, a huge fan of Lightmagick and a few other plug-ins, and the skin gallery was most definitely the DeviantArt of its day, much more so than Winamp, whose skin library during the 2.x days was much more formulaic.

Indeed. I have fond memories of Syberia. Don't get Syberia II, however, as it was another plague vector for Starforce (Yeah, I know I pretty much everyone who posts here knows what Starforce is, but I thought I should provide a link, just in case).

Portals soon get a reputation for bad reviews 'PC WORLD' anyone, there are even end user reviews where the first page of reviews are nothing but rehashed promotional material under various names. They might sell the product but they pay a price and you cant just launch a new brand name every few months. Of course desperate idiot executives trying to survive with in a company when they release yet another dud product will still do it, as they are desperate to extend their bloated salary for as long as possible, and it is the shareholders who end up paying an enormous price.

The net can kill any product faster than the marketdroids can promote it, and leaving a trail of pissed off vocal customers can be phenomenally expensive in the net age, you can't even sue the complainers because all that does is further publicize your 'faulty' products. Take for instance games and 'Starforce' protection (hidden installation of drivers), all that leads to is http://www.glop.org/starforce/ and people avoiding your games like the plague.

Plus, it allows Valve to sleep at night while I don't have to deal with a monstrosity like Starforce, which acts as a device driver and really screws up your CD and DVD ROM drives. I think Starforce is ten times worse than anything Sony did for anti-piracy, hands down.

here is one list I found

Can someone confirm this is the same Blizzard that hawks DRM crippleware?

The degree of DRM crippleware in their products vary. I'm pretty sure they've never used Starforce. Several require a CD; while the usual pirate NOCD patches exist, the NOCD versions can't be used to play via the Blizard.Net servers.

More complaints come about Blizzard's "Warden Client" anti-cheating package, since it's arguably a form of spyware, and the methods have some false positive potential. I thought I remembered it also had some limited copy-protection stuff, too (IE, complaining about Alcohol 120%), but I find no on-line confirmation.

There are certainly other makers that are have both more hostile and more friendly DRM attitudes; Blizzard seems about middle-of-the-road for the Games industry, as far as protection systems go.

Don't like DRM? Keep trying for that Amulet of Yendor.

Games using Starforce

Boycott Starforce Campaign

Wikipedia article

For starforce, http://www.glop.org/starforce/ has a pretty good list.

A few solutions for problem #1:

There are a few lists which strive to detail all games released with Starforce so you don't have to guess.

Ubisoft actually released an official patch to remove Starforce from their older game, X2. I can't tell you how eager I am to see a trend like that spread.

Karma whoring anonymously and loosely related reply to the original post, but consumers need to know that a list is being maintained of games that use starforce, so we can make informed decisions!

Information and lists regarding Starforce:
http://www.glop.org/starforce/

StarForce installs special drivers that allow user-level code to jump to System level. (That's even higher than Administrator, BTW.) Why does anyone think they'd do anything different in Vista? Malware will just find these kind of holes, and exploit them. And those holes will exist because even semi-legit software companies want them to.

Not to mention that with a game pirated off the net you don't have worry about some copy protection fucking up your computer.

While I do agree with not supporting the starforce thing - why the hell did you link to some writeup instead of the real site?

http://www.glop.org/starforce/ is the correct one.

I loved Halo one the PC, and refuse to use console controls for playing an FPS. I tried Halo 2 on xbox and the controller was pretty much unusable. All of the Halo fans who want to play on windows will have to lock in to DRM.

And I've already decided I won't be using Vista, so I guess I won't be playing Halo 2. No big loss since from what I hear (and from the hour or so I played it) it's more like Halo 1.5.

Since I'm also boycotting starforce, I probably won't be playing many more PC games in the future. Time to grow up I guess.

glop.org lists Trackmania Nations as containing starforce. Is this true? Trackmania Nations is a game that was released for free downloading by Nadeo, so copy protection on that seems like a weird thing to do...

Does anyone know more about it?

Perhaps your view is because you are not aware of the very extensive evidence that has previously been posted in highly respective technical forums in the past about this subject.

Read this from Tom's Hardware's Aaron McKenna:
http://www.tgdaily.com/2005/10/01/the_war_on_game_ pirates/index.html

Read the follow up letter by Starforce:
http://www.star-force.com/protection/protection.ph tml?c=256&id=658

Read Aaron's response letter to Dennis Zhidkov at:
http://www.glop.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=93

Ubi has received numerous emails from registered users of their games who have experienced this problem and are investigating them. Check their forums for more details on that.

Starforce regularly LOCKS and even deletes threads on their own forums whenever someone posts requesting for help with problems related to those discussed here, so they can keep up the pretense of not having any legitimate reports of problems.

I completely agree with Aaron's letter. When copy protection seeks to do modification to a person's system, regardless of what kind of "permission" they confuse the end user into giving them, then copy protection is going too far.

What release of IWD: Heart of Winter came with Starforce? I know mine didn't. In fact, I don't know of ANY of the IE-games (I own BG, BG:TotSC, BG2:SoA, BG2:ToB, PS:T, IWD1, IWD1:HoW, IWD2) shipping with copy-protection beyond a simple GetDriveTypeA-check.

Boycott
http://www.glop.org/starforce/

Starforce is picked by the publisher, not Egosoft. You should be writing this to either Deepsilver or Enlight, depending where you are. So no, you've not proved that Egosoft used Starforce. The publisher did. Likening Starforce to the whole Sony/root-kit thing is a little silly, as Starforce is clearly named as the CP in the game's manual. You're told it's gonna install. Almost all discussions on CP turn into discussions of piracy, and as a result this thread is being pre-emptively locked. If you have a problem with the CP, feel free to register your game and post the issue in the sticky in the Tech Support forum.

Ever since I heard about some of the random issues caused by Starforce a few years back, I've always avoided any game title under it's protection. You can find a pretty good up-to-date list of known Starforce protected titles over here - http://www.glop.org/starforce/

No DRM for at least a year, online business models proving that they can work, the R*AA losing a case... No DRM maybe.. except widespread use of "copy prevention" bloatware like Starforce... and the occasional Sony rootkit.

Which brings up a good point: the lack of public outrage about the whole Sony debacle. That's the way to track the real "winners" and "losers". The fact Sony can get away with that kind of stuff with no retribution or brand damage really shows who's on top in all of this.

http://www.glop.org/starforce/

http://www.similarities.org/starforce.html

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory uses destructive DRM copy protection software called Starforce. Starforce installs itself as an unsigned Windows driver and intercepts all calls to any CD/DVD drives on your system, causing potential system instability. It also opens several security holes in your system by allowing any code to run at ring-0 security level. An unofficial list of games that are infected with Starforce can be found here. A simple rule of thumb to avoid infection is to avoid buying any games published by Ubisoft.

Although I checked out the windows release of X2 when it was new, and thought it looked awesome, I refused to buy it because it contained Starforce. Starforce is a particularly insidious copy protection tool that installs device drivers without the user's consent or knowledge. Read about it here http://www.glop.org/starforce/. My question is, will this Linux port contain similar garbage?