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Hackproof Arcade
Haze:
--- Quote from: Gatt on April 11, 2010, 05:21:52 am ---
--- Quote from: DJ_Izumi on April 11, 2010, 01:13:15 am ---
--- Quote from: Gatt on April 11, 2010, 12:26:20 am ---You also give another good example, Starforce, I lost a DVD drive to starforce, there's definitely a reason to circumvent the DRM there.
--- End quote ---
I'm like 99.9999999% certian that your optical drive wasn't affected by Starforce and any failure it experienced was purely coincidental...
--- End quote ---
I've read the stuff on it, I know the official position's are that Starforce doesn't cause hardware failure. I'm just having a hard time with it. Starforce did something to my computer, and it caused very reproducible problems, ultimately my drive failed, and the replacement displayed the exact same problems until I finally pulled Starforce out.
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Well in my case it was causing BSOD errors, and I've read other accounts where it keeps dropping the CD drives down into lower speed PIO mode rather than DMA. Doing this will increase the stress on the drive (and CPU) because they're designed to read (and DMA) large amounts of data, not read block by block, and reseek between blocks etc.
I guess this might be why some people say it breaks their hardware (although when in PIO mode, it will appear 'broken' anyway because it will be so slow, and unreliable, and hog+stall the CPU on every access) I can also see how it could reduce the overall life of the hardware. So while StarForce might not have had 'nuke CDrom drive code' some of the behavior (in combination with various IDE drivers) was definitely buggy and it could potentially make it appear so, and quite possibly reduce the life of the drives, just as anything which can cause excessive stress on drives. I suspect this affected legitimate customers more than people pirating the games because the very nature of these copy protection systems is that they contain 'bad' areas, which could end up forcing drives into PIO mode etc. I've also seen faulty IDE drivers which will force everythnig on that channel into PIO mode if one drive drops down, which again could make the problem seem much worse. It was probably a combination of multiple factors, induced by StarForce.
(the same can happen with bad HDDs and certain driver combinations.. too many errors and it will drop back to PIO mode, sometimes the only way to restore it is to reinstall the device in Windows and reboot.)
I've tried to explain that in simple terms, so excuse me if some of it isn't quite 100% accurate on a technical level ;-)
Either way, my problem with it was that it BSOD'd windows on random CD accesses, and in the end I had to reinstall the entire OS. I doubt the game will even install anymore as I'm on a 64-bit system, another negative side of these driver-based protection systems; I bet the cracked version works fine tho.
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