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The Problems With Game Copy Protection
Next Generation has a piece looking at the sometimes overly enthusiastic copy protection schemes used in PC games. From the article: "In the late '80s and early '90s, the games industry could do little more than ask nicely that you not pirate their wares. These days, however, copy-protection software is ubiquitous, and any PC game bought at retail is going to have it embedded on the game disc(s) in one form or another. I'm okay with that in theory, but some of these anti-piracy software programs are so potent that they cause issues for legitimate game buyers. One of the leading brands, StarForce, is notorious for not only making it difficult for a small percentage of legitimate users to load up StarForce-protected games, but also for leaving potentially problem-causing StarForce software behind on your PC, even after you've deleted the game it was protecting."
In the days of several gig games, this becomes a real issue. If I'm playing one game and get stuck or bored with it, sometimes I have to install everything but the save-games to make room for something else.
Internet Archive: Live Music Archive
In the late '80s and early '90s, the games industry could do little more than ask nicely that you not pirate their wares.
No, they did do some things. Rumors of bad sectors on floppies burned in by lasers. Certainly floppies that had sectors marked as bad where the installer/runtime had code to force the disc controller to check for the errors and overlook them if they were found (i.e., intentionally put there), which prevented casual disk to disk copying.
Then HD's came out, and many forms of copy protection that were to stop floppy-floppy copying did not play well with those who wanted to run their games off of the HD. Eventually it was business software that had the worst problems with this, and they were the first ones to give up on it, lower prices to the point where the "fun" of copying programs was reduced, etc. Games came along shortly after. The least obtrusive game copy protections, IMHO, were those that required the manuals. But they were easy enough to defeat programmatically (SoftICE...), too.
Now with CloneCD, DaemonTools, the Internet (availability to NOCD cracks), etc., it seems like the industry should just realize that $50/game in the US probably wouldn't be as profitable as $19.00 and minimal CD protection. Requiring the CD to play a game, if only to keep SecureRom happy (all the media content gets d/l to the HD usually anyways...) sucks. And to think that some of the no-copy stuff is getting pretty sneaky (installing device drivers?) with little/no concern for user's computer, etc.
If they're that paranoid about it, they should just license MS' activation technology and methods, or go full on-line (where they can control the servers).
What they really need to do is work with the makers of the next storage medium (and quit putting games on CD sets in the US. A game that needs 3.0 GHz + Processor will probably have access to a DVD drive...). Movie makers have been teaming with hardware makers since macrovision to deter pirating. The game industry should try a similar approach instead of trying to tweak existing technology to help them.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
I've played games that require Starforce 3...namely X3 and PoP:T2T. I can say that anyone willing to go through the required process to break these games has no life. Basicly, these games require a special piece of (illigal) software, and then, you have to physically unplug your IDE CD-ROM drive power cable. Every time you want to play That's something not many people are willing to go through, thus, Starforce is doing a good job. Now, read TFA, and notice that they are doing a little too good of a job; namely, harming legit systems. It's a mess.
Have you ever used daemon tools......? Its actually quite simple...
Apple II games had all kinds of copy protection schemes, and there were all kinds of tools to get around them. Nibbles Away, Lockmaster, Locksmith, etc. Some games had holes punched in the disks in various places and wouldn't run of those areas could be read/written to. Etc.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Here's a pretty damn complete list of protections
t ections.shtml
http://www.cdmediaworld.com/hardware/cdrom/cd_pro
It includes how to detect the protection, how to back 'em up and usually a bit about how each one works
I remember that many years ago, I based my cd-burner purchasing decision on it's ability to rip/burn copy protected discs.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I don't know if anyone but me has noticed this, but Galactic Civilizations II (a recently released game), has absolutely no copy protection, and it's wonderful. No worries about losing my CD key, any sort of online authentication, or anything else. A great game, and a great set of developers.
Vandemar.org
Dude, instead of unplugging the drives, there is another way:
1. On BIOS, change the IDE detection to "No Drive Connected" or "Disabled"
2. Boot WinXP. It'll ignore the BIOS report of drives and do it's own detection. WinXP will find the CDROM.
3. Install Daemon tools.
4. Install your pirated game from the image you downloaded.
5. Open up your Device Manager and disable the physical CDROM.
6. Run the SFCrack or SFFuck tools to remove SF.
7. Play the game.
It works in almost every case. If you have a NForce3 mobo, you don't need to do anything. SF can't determone which drives are real and which are fake on NF3 chipsets.
BTW, X3 was a shitty game anyway.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
From what I understand, Starforce actually converts the executable, or parts of it, to a bytecode format which is encrypted and only usable with Starforce installed and functional. The developer can choose how much or how little to protect, generally leaving the high performance areas unprotected and a few well chosen pieces heavily protected. This effectively means that one needs to reverse engineer the Starforce bytecode or acquire the source for the executable.
This is also why a popular method for defeating SF in the past was to use the demo binaries with the full version data, which has now led to demos being infected with this crap.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
Use GNU stow and install as a regular user. It was designed specifically to make this happen, and it works quite well.
I bought the collectors edition of HL2. I'm not into counterstrike or any of the other games, I just wanted HL2. I installed it on my machine and tried to run it and ended up spending the better part of 2 weeks trying to get it working.
I had the priviledge of participating in live chat, e-mail and phone support with several different reps working from scripts in India. None really knew what was going on, but their flow charts did point in the right direction: there was some problem with the DVD or the drive that was keeping the game from running.
Upon launch the HL2.exe process would run, ramp up it's memory and processor usage and then quietly quit. no error, no feedback. After several reinstalls of both game and OS I exchanged my dvd for a new one, only to have the same problem. Rather than swap out my drive I pulled disc check crack off the internet and sure enough the game loaded without any issues.
Not only is there issues with their remote auth for the game, but there are issues with the SecuROM protection they use on the actual discs, forcing me to crack my legit copy of HL2 just to get the damn thing to *run*.
Apparently they removed this protection later via a steam update, but prior to that it was easier for me to pirate the game than to launch it legitmately.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
I recently purchased Battlefield 2 from EA. After a Lengthy install, the game refused to run stating I had CDRom emulators on my system (I didn't). I verified in my device manager that there was a single CDRom and it was the physical one in the machine. I opened a support ticket with EA and got many canned answers that had nothing to do with my problems. When I finally got the attention of a tech there that had some insight, I was basically told I'm screwed. They didn't know why and weren't willing to refund my money. Compusa was also inwilling to provide a refund as the box had been opened. So I'm stuck with a $50 game I cannot run legitmately. I did however finally get it to run using pirate mechanisms.
Once again, this shows their copy protection only hurts those that buy the game.
I started with nothing and have most of it left.
Too bad Linux doesn't do any of this...
No, it's really not. The whole point of dynamic (shared) libraries is that they are shared. Windows may be terrible at dealing with different versions of the same shared library, but Unix is not. There is no "ideal mechanism for software management"; there are pros and cons to any approach.
Windows likes to have each program confined to a neat little space, except for DLLs, which are utterly inconsistent, and the registry, which is a terrible idea for many reasons. Honestly, I'm not sure how this approach is beneficial, other than aesthetically.
Then there's Unix. Executable binaries go in a /bin, shared libraries go in a /lib (tagged with their version, so incompatible versions of a library can happily coexist), configuration goes directly on the filesystem in /etc, documentation goes in /usr/man, et cetera. A good package manager has no trouble keeping track of this for when you want to remove the package, it makes your PATH easy to manage, you know where to go when you want to reconfigure something, and so on. If you're running "rogue applications", you've got bigger problems.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Apple//s were capable of 70 tracks per disk (side,) but the read/write head was large enough that you couldn't reliably write to them all without affecting a neighboring track. To get by this, they just used every other track, the unused ones were referred to as "half-tracks". Some games used these these half-tracks instead of the regular ones, so if you tried to copy the disks with some of the more simpler copy programs, you'd completely miss this data.
Some games even used quarter-tracks in their protection schemes.
As far as im aware no optical drive console with the exception of the dreamcast has ever been cracked.
Early ones didnt have protection so couldnt be cracked. Later ones have all relied on mod chips and the like to run. (I believe the Saturn has a mod that will allow them to run like the others.) So its not unusual that the Saturn is uncracked and may remain uncracked.
The fact is copy protection to stop CD-R's is virtually impossible to stop by using CD-R's. The only reason the DC failed was because they left a gaping hole in the security. (Emphasis on gaping, its not something that will happen regularly, so you cant rely on errors like that to crack consoles.)
Unfortunately your best bet for using your backups (ignoring mods and disk swapping) is to utilise an emulator.
To find the intrusive Starforce device, look in Windows Device Manager, select Show Hidden Devices, and look for Starforce in the Non-Plug and Play tree.
Now that's something an application program should not be doing.
There's a StarForce removal tool, but it's from the Starforce people, and probably should not be trusted.
Starforce is threatening to sue Cory Doctorow for calling their product "malware". That would be amusing if they went through with it.
One of the nice things about Stardock's new Galactic Civilizations II game, besides it just being ridiculously fun, is that there is no CD copy protection at all.
In recent months, there were numerous threads on the Bethesda Softworks message boards regarding whether TES: Oblivion would be released with Starforce as its copy protection scheme. Most people posting to these threads were steadfastly against the use of Starforce, and many stated that they would outright refuse to buy the product if it included Starforce.
Not too long ago, Neowin.net published a podcast interview with Pete Hines, the PR guy for the Elder Scrolls series. He was asked about the antipiracy scheme that Bethesda and Take Two planned to use on the PC version of Oblivion, and more pointedly, he was asked about Starforce.
He said (paraphrased) that while they couldn't comment on what antipiracy scheme they were going to use, they were not going to use Starforce.
Score one for the consumer.
This one's quite a bit more devious though than a silly little shareware game. There's many layers to it. When you first run the game executable, it checks to see if you have the starforce drivers installed. If not, it installs them and you have to reboot before the game will work.
Once the drivers are loaded, the game will start up and make numerous calls though them which includes a load of debug-hostile code (standard anti-debug checks plus things like using the single-step and breakpoint interrupts as part of their own code). They manually load portions of the ntdll code into memory and call those functions via their own routines rather than making standard system calls. Pretty much the entire cd-check process is not written in x86 assembly. It's a CPU emulator with a virtual CPU of their own design. Reads the pseudo-code and their interpreter translates it instruction by instruction. So you have to figure out their opcodes and any associated decryption that takes place inside their virtual machine. Once you pass all this, the game itself might have entire functions removed and replaced with their virtual machine code as well. These would have to be figured out and replaced with x86 instructions so that the code is not dependent on their VM to run.
In some cases, they also encrypt a number of the game resource files (audio, textures, etc) into one large file instead, then redirect game calls for these files into it like an ISO image. This is the starforce file system (in newer versions, the first four bytes of these files is "SFFS"). You'll have to decrypt and extract all of these files as well.
Plus there's all sorts of other nasty tricks to make performing the above steps even more difficult..
Despite all of this, games with this protection HAVE been cracked completely... It just takes a lot of time and dedication by people with the right knowledge and inclination to do so.
If it were as simple as you think, this protection would have been tossed aside long ago, like so many others.
Nope - GalCiv II is written by StarDock, and they have nothing to do with MOO.
Their previous Game - GalCiv - was also not protected. They thought that they'd sell about 30,000 games, but it turned out to be over 100,000 - no copy protection seems to pay out.
And it does explain why I've bought both games. Yes, bought. I *like* not being bothered by some damn Digital Restriction Management, and the games are both very good - and well supported, on top of it.
Have a look at http://galciv.com/ (no, I have nothing to do with them)
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
Shader 2 support is not a copy protection scheme, it means you need a real video card. Support for PS1 and even non-pixel shader cards has been holding devs back since they have to do a lot of extra work to get the most quality that they can manage out of those systems, so they are finally getting brave enough to require users to have a video card made in the past few years (even a cheap one like that god-awful FX 5200...)
Thing is, it says on the box about it's graphics cards requirements I'm pretty sure. Usually it says something along the lines of "A Geforce FX 5200 or higher or a Radeon 9500 or higher" or something kind of like that to prevent confusion as best as possible, but, I am forced to admit that people like nvidia and ati screw things up by making cards that pretend to be something they are not, such as what probably got your friend, a Geforce "4" MX series card (in particular it's the 4000 that gets me since it pretends to be almost as good as a Ti-4200, but, a Ti-4200 is a real 3D card while a GF4MX was a real 3D card only before GF3 came out back when it was called GF2MX instead.) Anyway, your friend is sadly overdue for a video upgrade. I'd recommend a Geforce 6600GT as a pretty cheap card that should last him a few years.
That can backfire though. I had a friend tearing his hair out over Metal Gear Solid on the PSOne, he was telling me how a character was asking for the number on the back of the CD, and how he went everywhere looking for this CD in the game. His jaw hit the floor when I said "Er.. they mean the actual GAME cd".
(MGS was particularly bad for that though. Way to break the suspension of disbelief, when in game speech starts talking about the triangle buttons, and Psycho Mantis tells you to put your controller on the floor. It would be like people in films stopping to ask you if wanted to go get a cup of tea!)
FWIW, I've used D-Skins, and my impression was that I wasted $10. I tried it on my DVD's and my DVD player couldn't read the disk. The skin also didn't seem to fit on tight enough to use in my slot load PC DVD drive. I had visions of ejecting the disk and watching the drive strip the skin off and screw up the internal mechanisms. I have no proof that it would do that, but the build quality of the skins seemed so flimsy I didn't want to risk it.
It's cheap enough that you might want to see for yourself, but I wouldn't recommend them.
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In X-Windows the client serves YOU!
The ideal mechanism for software management is for the OS to only permit software to be installed in a specific directory tree, one per application, instead of allowing software to sprinkle DLLs all over the place. Installation should be a recorded transaction which can be replayed in reverse by the OS to verify that software has truly been removed. This, along with really good privilege separation, will ensure that rogue applications cannot evade detection and removal.
Too bad Linux doesn't do any of this...
GoboLinux does. That's why I like it so much. (Well, that and the fact that both source and binary installs are first-class citizens). To remove a program completely, delete a folder (and run a script to automatically clean up some symlinks if you feel like being tidy). During the install, programs are only given write permissions in a specific folder, so this scheme is enforced by the system even if a badly behaved programs tries to put things outside its target directory.
It even goes one further than your suggestion, by separating directories by version number as well. If the different versions of the same program/library have differently-named files they can simply co-exist, and if they have conflicting names then it's a simple switch to decide which one you want to be "active."
The cool part: most programs don't require any modification to compile/install properly using the GoboLinux-provided installer (including anything based on autoconf or a decent Makefile, or standard Perl/Python apps).