So, maybe it's old news, and I'm just hearing about it, but should I be worried about Starforce installations, and the artificial drivers they install on my machine?

I read the Wikipedia article about it, and it seems to block the use fo SCSI drives for certain games, when an IDE drive is present, and my RAID array is technically an SCSI drive (at least, Windows thinks it is)...

I DON'T want to install more things on my 20 Gb IDE hard drive than I have to...it's really just for Windows, while I like to keep the rest of my programs (like games) elsewhere...

Also, I'd like to update to Windows 64 at some point...and I hear there are compatibility issues there also...

Oh, and yes, I've checked, Starforce is lurking in my device manager, pretending to be a non-plug-and-play device...

oh, and here's an article:

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

[ 01-31-2006, 01:32 PM: Message edited by: Ilander ]

Wow! Thanks for posting this Ilander! I never knew this issue was about until now. Some of the PC games listed surprised me because they are pretty good sellers. It reminds what Sony's Rootkit as well as WinFix does to a PC. The only thing I can tell you to do -- unless you want to utilize their own toolkit removal -- is reformatting. I had to with WinFix.

That's a surprising list of games, and this has evidently been going on for a while, as I have Icewind Dale Heart of Winter, I just hadn't gotten around to installing it, and now I won't. I didn't understand if removing it would render the game unplayable or not?

Well, if you would, Starforce would probably reinstall itself again, no ?

Anyway, i just followed the steps in the link, and it turned out i had the Starforce drivers too. I checked the list of games, and of all the titles i only own copies of Panzers Phase 1, which is not even installed yet, and Cossacks 2 Napoleonic Wars, which is installed, so there's the evil doer. :D

I downloaded the removal tool and succesfully removed the SF drivers, so Cossacks probably won't run anymore, but that's okay, because i never gave it much attention anyway. I'll check if it's indeed disabled later, just to make sure.

Yeah Starforce suck. There are tons of games that use it too.

If you uninstalled it those games won't run.

The King Kong demo runs, after removing Starforce...

But it's a demo.

Why do you think they install starforce? It's a copy protection.

Fortuitous timing... it just so happens I accidentally bought one of those games last weekend (Brothers in Arm - Earned in Blood) and didn't notice the warning. I didn't want to return the game, so I looked around on the internet for something to disable starware.

First place I checked had a hack out for that crapware, which allowed me to uninstall it and still play BIA just fine (single player). I assume since it's been hacked for one game, you can probably find hacks for others. The problem of course is you have to install the game FIRST... then hack it... then remove the starware driver and files.

I wouldn't install it on a system using a raid array (scsi or otherwise)... I've read of array corruption issues caused by their driver, and I expect that hacking the exe to remove the copy protection will probably be a problem if you're into online gaming (I'm not)... however it works just fine for lan gaming.

[ 01-31-2006, 06:24 PM: Message edited by: Thoran ]

I would have been INCREDIBLY upset if my array got eaten by some stupid corporate decision...and there would have been no compensation for me, either :S

I'm glad I caught it!

<font color=8fbc8f>Very interesting, very indeed. Not once did I see any reference at all to Linux/Unix. Could it be.......</font>