“Copy Protection, Customer Prevention!@#!” - Part 2: The UbiForce

Ubisoft – The “We’re listening, but who cares, company”.

  First things first, you should really Go read my first article if you haven’t already. The only point I’m going to reiterate is this. I DON’T PIRATE GAMES#~!@.

  When I wrote that first article, I did not include anything about StarForce, there is a good reason for that. At the time, I didn’t know it existed. Now that’s not saying I wasn’t being affected by it, I just said I didn’t know it existed. I learnt about it the hard way.

  To tell you the truth, on my own personal system, my problem with StarForce was relatively minor. What pisses me off, is how it happened and what happened afterwards. But I’m getting ahead of myself, so I start with how exactly I found out about StarForce and the utter crap that it is.

  I bought Splinter Cell 3 the day it came out; actually before, because I pre-ordered it from “EB”. The first “Copy protection” article, was actually written after I bought it (All 3 games can be seen in THIS picture in the first article).

  Months later, sometime after August, I finally convinced a friend to get Chaos Theory, as I thought it was a great game, best of the 3 in my opinion. The day after he installed it, I went over to his house, and he was busy trying to get his DVD burner and CD burner to work. They would just fail to burn anything correctly. He burns so many CD’s and DVD’s, that it was a major problem for him. We attempted to do all the normal things for de-bugging; shutdown everything else, reboot the system, use a different burning program, try different blank media etc etc etc.

   Finally, the only thing left to try was to “Flash the firmware” with an updated version and see if that worked on his DVD burner. Unfortunately, it did not do anything as far as we could tell. Then, by a random bit of luck, my friend happened to find a reference to Splinter Cell 3 and StarForce on the BenQ (the maker of his DVD burner) help section. Note that I said *RANDOM* as that will be an important part of my rant later.

  We then started looking for information about StarForce, and finally came up with a link to a “StarForce Uninstaller”. I was there when he ran it. All the CD’s he had tried that day failed, even the test before using the uninstaller. The very next CD he burnt after using the uninstaller and rebooting his system, worked flawlessly. DVD’s worked as well, but we soon learned that something was still wrong with the DVD burner, as it’s error rates were quite high after the experience. What actually happened is up for debate with the DVD burner.

   The theory is that because the Rom was flashed when StarForce was still installed, either the flashing itself caused a problem, or the fact that StarForce was installed at the time of the flash caused a problem, or the 3^rd option is that StarForce alone did permanent damage to the drive. We’ll never know for sure on that point.

   After seeing what happened to my friends computer, I started to mentally go through my own system to think of any problems I was having. While I was thinking about it, my friend Alt-tabbed out of UT2004 to go to a webpage. His computer Alt-tabbed almost instantly, and the same with bringing up the task manager. When I saw this, I went “hey, how come your computer does that so much faster than mine? My system took about 10-20 seconds to alt-tab out of the same game, maybe 5 seconds when I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL. At the time, I had an AMD64 3500, 1GB of ram, and a Geforce 6800GT. He had an AMD XP 2700, 786MB of ram and a Geforce 4 4600.

   Since we learned that StarForce puts a new layer of drivers onto a computer, which controls all your IDE drives (hence some people not being able to see their drives when StarForce is installed and borks), I decided to run the uninstaller on my own system and see if that made any sort of difference.

   Well, the difference was night and day. Averaging 10 seconds to alt-tab out of UT2004, down to instantaneously with StarForce removed. To be sure of my result, I put the Splinter Cell Chaos theory DVD back in, and started the game. I was prompted that I needed to restart my computer before I could play Splinter Cell again. When I got back to windows, started up UT 2004 again, yup 10 seconds to alt-tab out. Conclusive proof, that StarForce was the cause of my problem.