StarForce - The PC CD-ROM DRM that broke your Computer | MVG 

Take a shot every-time i say 'StarForce' in this video

DRM: Let's punish 98% players so that the 2% of players will have to wait one more week to play

I like how starforce's website is labeled by your browser as "not secure." The irony.

A friend of mine from back in the day, who was an attorney by day, game addict by night, used to do game reviews on the side for extra income, and was once threatened with a lawsuit over a negative review he gave of a Starforce crippled game. His reply was absolutely classic - "I look forward to full discovery," signed, so-and-so, "ESQUIRE." Last I knew, he never heard back from anyone.

Even some official re-releases used no-cd cracks created by the scene. Embarrassingly leaving the ascii art in the .exe.

DRM: Making piracy an attractive option since forever.

Imagine if there was a law that mandated either a refund or unlocked version release in the event that a game becomes unplayable. It would almost be like you actually owned the stuff you bought.

Me: Glad we have intrusive terrible DRMs behind us Denubo: hold my VM in a VM in a VM in a VM

Rings are feature of the CPU, not the OS (Windows). All x86 based OSes leverage the rings. Different aspects of the OS will run in different rings depending on the need. The core kernel will need to run in ring-0 to control the whole of the hardware. By using low level drivers they are effectively shimming into some of the lowest levels of the system and implement the DRM.

You just reminded me of a one-off occurrence from when I was 14. GTA San Andreas got an update but I was planning on sharing the game while traveling with family that didn't have Internet access. I used a hex editor to compare the 1.0 exe, 1.0x update, and 1.0 NoCD exe, and then made the change from the NoCD to the update. Did not think it would work...but it did! The only time I genuinely felt like Hackerman.

There is also that story I heard of when the developers of "Sins of a Solar Empire" refused to use StarForce in their game, the StarForce developers responded by putting up torrents of their games as petty payback. Don't know how true it is, but it honestly wouldn't surprise me.

It's funny how the more heavy handed the DRM becomes. The more sense it makes to just crack the game

Mistakes were made: this thing was invented.

Ended up buying a PS2 just to play Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones. StarForce was THAT bad.

One of the most baffling things I remember about StarForce was it's inclusion in original Trackmania Nations, a free to play game only distributed digitally :) SF is actually the only reason you can't play that game on modern systems these days.

Splinter Cell: *takes 400 days to crack* Doom Eternal: "here's a DRM-free version lmao"

If I remember correctly in order to claim the "price" for having your PC broken by StarForce you had to personally deliver it to the StarForce office in Moscow, at your own expense. Not terribly surprising there weren't any takers.

So essentially, Starforce was malware.

DRM only hurts the customer, not the pirate. Publishers need to understand this already.

I kinda love that almost all the anti-piracy measures you cover have "mistakes were made" in the thumbnail. It's almost as if DRM itself is a mistake.

Starforce legit broke one of my DVD drives one time. It didn't work on any PC afterwards.

At this stage - shove a dvd/cd into a USB port and you have an exact replica of what these DRMs achieve

1:00 Piracy has been around for decades, and has never died. All the while, the industry is still alive, well, bigger than ever, and still continuing to grow. DRM hasn't staved off the industry's extinction, it's merely kept piracy relevant and nothing more. The PS1 and PS2 eras were both absolutely rampant with piracy on all systems, and look at the numbers those eras produced, back when "gaming" was still considered nerdy, or uncool. DRM is all about greed, control, and manipulation. End of story.

Thank goodness there are groups of people dedicated to remove this crap from games to help with preservation and with compatibility. If it weren't for teams such as Razor, Reloaded and etc we'd lose a lot of gems.

World racing 2, starforce made me reinstall windows.

I think it may have been helpful to mention that, in addition to running with higher privileges, kernel drivers require much higher code quality and reliability. A user-mode driver crash will crash the program that uses it. A kernel driver crash kills the entire operating system. This is why the shoddy (and shady) code in StarForce caused the OS to crash. Once it fucks something up, it takes the entire kernel down with it. Also, I want to add: SecuROM breaks games. StarForce breaks your computer. You can keep your playable games, I prefer the magic.

"Ubisoft then dropped StarForce for SecuRom." Oh hey, LOOK WHAT'S IN MY PLAY NEXT SLOT. *SecuROM - The PC CD-ROM DRM that broke games* lol

As much as people hated StarForce, you have to admire the technical skill required to implement such comprehensive copy-protection. Redirecting system interrupts? That shit is hardcore.

I'm glad someone else is also talking about this DRM. This by far is the worst, and most destructive DRM for modern computers, and sadly, people who don't know this are bound to corrupt their Windows. Great video, keep up the good work!

I'm okay with the current approach: launch with Denuvo, remove it after the sales window closes. This is a fair compromise in which people who absolutely must play the game at launch can do so, while game preservation and modification can enter the fold well before compatibility becomes an issue.

I remember there was a version of starforce when after installing alcohol 120% you just unplug all optical drives and start the game from virtual drive without any cracks.

Always check PCGamingWiki's information for an old PC game before installing. They will tell you if it contains a DRM that is not compatible with Windows 10. Unfortunately I did not do this when I installed one of the Brothers in Arms games and after the next restart Windows refused to boot. I had to go into the recovery console and remove the DRM's DLL file to get Windows 10 working again.

"Starforce on Vista" oh boy, what a mix lol

Oh crap I just realize I have Star Force installed on my NES. And an additional cart in my game drawer. In all seriousness good job covering the dangers of DRM.

The piracy argument have been proven to be nonsense already. There's two types of people who pirate games: One type wouldn't have bought the game anyway, so there's no loss of profit. The other type wouldn't have bought the game blindly, but after having pirated it, played it, and seen that they like it, they decide to support the devs by then buying it. Often even if they've already finished the pirated version, and even if they won't actually (re)play the legal version. They just buy it after-the-fact and let it sit in their library, but they still consider it money well spent. So in the end, piracy doesn't cause a loss, but might cause some extra income for the creators. Which some companies have realized, so the coolest ones actually create the "pirate torrent" themselves.

NoCD cracks are so nostalgic for me. As a kid I lost my CDs and serial keys all the time. Then I found out I could just download games for free, blew my 8 year old mind lol.

"God, I'm so bored", I said out loud, returning RU-vid's main page yet again. And then I saw this video, and my boredom shattered into 10^64 pieces and died. Thank you.

A year ago I decided to reinstall Prince of Persia: T2T on Windows 10 from my old original CD. It didn't boot until I remove its "drivers" using a live CD. I download a patched pirated version, and I don't feel any guilt.

I'm gonna be honest, making software that breaks things on software and hardware levels shouldn't be ok just because the EULA says "not our fault we can't code".

i found that often the game would take 5 years to load if i had the cd in, but as soon as i popped that nocd crack in it would take 5ms did i say i used cracks? oh shit

Oh boy, a good old nemesis of a gamer from back in the day! StarForce and mistakes were made in the same thumbnail = drop everything else and watch.

This is what happens when you give kernel access to Russian spaghetti code.

Everyone: Do you destroy PC's? StarForce: DA!

I find it funny that Ubisoft to this day is still known for using heavy-handed DRM in their games.

*MVG theme starts up* You gonna learn today...

I may be confusing StarForce with some other protection measure or something else, but I think it happened with SF protected game CDs, where the more worn out your disc was, the lower was the chance you would pass the checks, and it took longer and longer to launch games, until it stopped functioning completely. Oh, and don't forget chainsaw sounds from spinning the disc on maximum speed inside your drive when validation sequence starts.

Mistakes were certainly not made when I subscribed to this fantastic channel! Every video got excellent pace and is so easy to understand even tho I got no knowledge about the subject. I was surprised to also hear FrameRater in your video 👍

I remember Starforce. Not that I had any particular issue with it, but I remember that everytime that I wanted to play Trackmania, Starforce would start by checking the presence of the disk by spinning the CD and doing so much noises... And the sound that my drive did still haunt me to this day :'(

Hey MVG just wanted to say I am impressed at how many videos you are able to get out a d still have them be such high quality and full of information. Just wanted to say thanks for all the awesome content. Keep up the great work.

Your intro music brightens my day! You're a wizard dude.. Your videos are spot on

Great video, glad RU-vid recommended your channel! While my memory has been affected by disability, back when I was still abled I was studying computer Science at Stetson, and your delivery style makes this kind of content really digestible and reminds me of what they were teaching us before I went on medical leave! How nostalgic :D

Can you do a video on the Myth 2 (Bungie) installer bug that would nuke Windows installations when uninstalled? I remember a couple years ago I didn't know about it, had an original disc and... it was a bit of a shock.

I completely forgot that Starforce even existed to be honest. I soon remembered after I installed GT Legends on my Windows 10 PC just to see if the game would still work on Windows 10. Next time I rebooted - completely non-bootable.

Ah, StarForce, the software that prevented me from playing my legal copy of Worms 4 after Windows Vista (which was already very buggy). On Windows 7, it wouldn't work. When I tried it on my current PC running Windows 10, it outright corrupted my system drive ! Thanks game ! I broke the disk out of anger.

Hey, congrats on getting FrameRater to do a voice over for ya. The guy deserves a bigger following, and I thank you for giving him that exposure.

I love your videos, I was/am active in the scene and love hearing the old stories, Gives me insights on stuff going that i did not know the details of. LOVE IT keep it up!

Daaaamn got so many flashback while watching this. Remember taking a hit at starforce in the days gone. It was actually brute hacked in 3 months, but the instructions along with binary were mainly on russian forums and were incomplete, as every game DRM used a somewhat different method. STARforce monitored these communities and actually updated the DRM in silence even on hacked versions via driver updates :D so you could have a working crack today and tomorrow no more. Ahh the good old days, where hacking a game to work took as long as to play the game itself.

I remember you could bybass StarForce on some games with a burnt DVD via clone DVD, an external DVD drive and all internal drives disconnected.

I worked at a PC repair shop when the Sony rootkit and Star Force made their appearances. I did a study on the effects of Star Force. I created identical systems. One with a StarForce game, the other without. I conducted identical steps with the optical drives on the system (a CD-R and DVD-R drive) Using the CD-R for a backup of misc. Office files: The burn process began at full speed. But it quickly slowed down to Programmable I/O (PIO) mode (2x burn speed) That burned CD was unreadable on the SF system by either optical drive but read fine on the other. Using the DVD-R for backup of misc. Office files: The burn process began at full speed. But it quickly slowed down to PIO mode. Within seconds of entering PIO mode, the system either froze or BSOD. . After 5 attempts, the DVD-R drive was no longer detected by the OS or in the BIOS. Swapped it to the other system. It was not detected by the OS or BIOS. Dead. I conducted this same process on three more systems. On each system with SF installed, the DVD-R drive failed after 5,7, and 5 attempts. We also used a different brand of DVD-R drive for each test. In later research, I found that DVD drives, unlike CD drives, were not designed to function in PIO mode. Therefore forcing them into that mode caused them to choke. And choking it too many times, killed it.

Congrats on 400k mate. Keep up the quality content!

I bought Trackmania Sunrise in the XP days. Haven't been able to play it since upgrading to newer versions of Windows. Not to mention multiple issues with it back in the day...

the starforce dudes were russian? man, for some reason i thought i remembered they were french? maybe i'd associated it with Ubisoft? its interesting that i sort of remember them at all to be honest, I think i was was still in high school when it was still a thing; i never really had issues with drm doing wonky stuff to my computer, my dad had a subscription to PC Gamer and I recall reading about Starforce and its issues fairly regularly in its articles and the uh, kind of snarky, probably ill advised, tone that 'Protection Tech' would use in its PR.

4:27. That "my eyes" cover. Bandcamp release maybe? Anyhow - excellent video as always!

1:55 Hearing the phrase "Daemon Tools" blasted me with a huge wave of nostalgia

Even StarForce and Denuvo aren't as bad as relying on connection to the official server like many games do nowadays.

You should do a video on Denuvo, always interesting to hear your insight on this kind of thing

awesome and interesting vid as usual! one small thing i noticed at 5:51 installed had 3 L's XD

I can personally confirm that the talk about physical damage to optical drives is true- The blasted thing ruined my first laptop’s DVD Burner- ironically I was “infected” by a legal copy of one of CENAGA’s UFO After_____ games- and went full on torrenting .iso’s as a result- it simply died :( It’s also important to note that at the time, they were demanding that people ship their PC to Russia/eastern Europe for analysis- at the senders cost- it wasn’t truely in good-faith...

The flight simulator DCS was running StarForce DRM up until fairly recently.

long live GOG. thank you for this, CD Projekt Red.

I always wanted this video from you! Thanks.

your amazing intro music give me chills!

Everytime a video about DRM came out it's always about how the said DRM ruins the experience for its users or outright damage hardware. Why can't we have a video about helpful, successful DRMs for once? OH, WAIT

Thanks for covering this! the starforce on prince of Persia two thrones ruined my child hood windows xp PC, this explains all the issues that pc had at the time my childhood brain could never understand haha. I knew the problem was starforce but never at this detail, really thank you! all makes sense now.

Loving these DRM Videos, keep them coming 👍👍

Congratulations to 400.000 subscribers!

Anti-Piracy Protextion: *exists* *Clone CD* : I'm About to End This Man's Whole Career

I was just reading about this on some old forums when I opened up RU-vid and your video popped up. Holy shit.

Great video MVG!!!! You are always a wealth of information.

I sincerely love your videos. Keep gaming, my dude.

Oh boy, this thing is what caused my physical copy of GT Legends to make me think my computer broke. Thankfully I had a live CD of a Linux distro that allowed me to remove the faulty .sys files that it installed into the system. However, even after getting a copy of it on Steam, it refused to run on my PC...

I love your channel. Not only do you have fun, informative videos that illustrate that you actually know what you're talking about, but you don't screech and act like a 13 year old. Great content. You deserve 3m subs.

Fun fact: the security rings are actually a part of x86 Protected Mode. However, the presence of more than two rings is kind of unique to x86, and WinNT used to be available for other system types that do only have two rings, hence why the x86 version only uses two as well. Interestingly, though, apparently Virtualbox runs the kernels of its guest systems through ring 1.

As a newcomer to your channel, I am addicted to your videos! They are really awesome!

I like how the CC almost always says "Star Wars" instead of "Star Force."

4:27 someone hasn't watched lgr's crt recording guide ^^

Awesome content thanks so much! Love your channel

I really love this series. Also this Intro is just fabulous

6:00 is that background song not also in the oculus game robo recall? Seems familiar somehow. Very interesting video as always :D

Meanwhile at Denuvo Inc: "We're gonna run anti-cheat on ring 0 and it's gonna be great!"

I had similar issues with King Kong a few years ago and I didn't know, it was a DRM that caused the bluescreens. Looks like I'm pretty lucky, that I didn't had to reinstall my operating system.. Very interesting video. It gave answers to questions I never knew I had

I love how consistently inflected your sign off is. You fucking rock, dude- keeping our brains engaged during these hellish times.

All they need to is release DRM free versions after a few years.

Plot twist : Bully Scholarship Edition didn't have DRM on DVD but was still very successful

I'd love to see a video made by you on how the old Starforce games were cracked. Excellent video as always

So glad to hear my homie framerater in your new video

Valorant anticheat did the same, install as system driver. That means StarForce 2: electric bogaloo?

They were very shady. Not to mention offset print shop and CD manufacturing, that produced pirated CDs and were located in the same building with StarForce creator, Protection Technology LLC, in Moscow.

So I was just looking for this today. It’s the only video on YT about it. What a coincidence! You got a like.

Pretty interesting! Thanks for uploading!