Starforce?!

In June 2005, I bought myself a new computer, fitted for gaming, on which I installed Windows 2000 Professional. I set it up the way I wanted, and once my school semester was over, I went and bought three games: Colin McRae Rally 2005, ToCA Race Driver 2, and TrackMania Sunrise, all three of which were fitted with the Starforce protection. I also installed Roxio Easy Media Creator 7.5 in order to back-up my important files and documents to CDs and DVDs, and Alcohol 120% to create CDs of Fedora Core 5, which I installed much later on a separate partition.

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 XP 3200+
Motherboard: ASUS A8V-E Deluxe
Graphics: ASUS GeForce EN7600 GS Silent
CD/DVD: LG GSA-4163B
Sound: Internal
Hard Drives: 1x 80 GB SATA, 2x 250 GB IDE (Western Digital), 1x 40 GB IDE (Maxtor)
Network: Internal
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional, Linux Fedora Core 5 (Dual-boot)

After several weeks, I wrote a DVD but noticed an overly sluggish performance. I downloaded a CD Benchmark tool to confirm the symptoms and got the following results:

CD Maximum Read Speed: 17.4X, stuttering (out of supposed 40X)
CD-R Maximum Write Speed: 8X (out of supposed 40X)
DVD+R Maximum Read Speed: 2.1X (out of supposed 8X)
DVD+R Maximum Write Speed: 1.3X (out of supposed 16X)

The benchmark tool also noticed that while reading or writing to a CD or DVD, the CPU usage shot through the roof. I find this behavior very unusual but haven't found the culprit for it.

After a bit of searching, I found out there was a correlation between degrading CD/DVD performance and the Starforce protection. So, I E-Mailed their support to see if they had any solution to my problem:

Hi,

I am experiencing an issue which I believe is related to the StarForce protection driver.

I bought my machine early last summer, which came with a LG GSA-4163B CD/DVD+-RW drive (http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Reviews/Specific.aspx?ArticleId=12429) It can burn CDs at up to 40X and DVDs at 16X.

I then bought three Starforce-protected games in the course of the year: TrackMania Sunrise, ToCA Race Driver 2, and Colin McRae Rally 2005. However, after several weeks, my drive burning speeds took a rapid drop to eventually settle at 8X for CDs and 1.3X for DVDs. It can't go any higher than that, no matter the settings, program, or selected write speed. Needless to say, backing up my files has become an unnecessarily long task.

After hearing about Starforce users having experienced similar problems, I removed the drivers and tried burning another DVD. No results. It seems at first glance that the drive has truly frozen to its new sluggish speed. Benchmarks with the Nero CD Speed utility (http://www.cdspeed2000.com) left me with the following results:

CD Maximum Read Speed: 17.4X, stuttering (out of supposed 40X)
CD-R Maximum Write Speed: 8X (out of supposed 40X)
DVD+R Maximum Read Speed: 2.1X (out of supposed 8X)
DVD+R Maximum Write Speed: 1.3X (out of supposed 16X)

This brings me the following questions: Do you know if these problems are related to the Starforce drivers, and if so, are you aware of any solutions?

Try to uninstall your cd-rom drive from device manager (along with IDE controller which connects to this drive) and reboot. After reboot drive and controller will be installed again. Tell us if problem remains after this steps.

-----------------
Sergei Komissarov
Customer Support Group
StarForce Technologies

Note: They didn't answer me within a week, so I ended up sending this reply twice. The day after the second send, they replied:

I uninstalled the drivers (again) since I had played a game during the course of the conversation. But that time, as I rebooted, the computer popped up a New Hardware Device installation box...

Hi,

I removed the drivers - again - and rebooted, but was greeted with a New Hardware Wizard, saying it had detected a "Hardware Interrupt Controller". I couldn't install it, nor could I get it to go away... If I run one of my games, Starforce reinstalls as expected but the Windows Device Manager warns me the Starforce drivers are not working properly (although the games themselves run fine.) Is it something to worry about?

That pretty much put an end to it, until I fell on a small text telling about drive modes and how they affect performance. According to the post, if I went into my IDE controller properties and checked the mode, I would get an answer. If it was in Ultra DMA mode, the drive would theoretically function normally. If it was in PIO mode, it would work much more slowly, and may be incompatible with newer CD/DVD drives.

Sure enough, it was in PIO mode. I re-selected Ultra DMA, ran a benchmark, and this time saw a near-perfect improvement. The CD reading and writing were top notch, while the DVD was operating at close to 75% of its capacity. It seemed that the damage wasn't as extensive as I had thought.

Hi,

Further investigation on the Internet revealed that my CD/DVD drive's mode had been changed to PIO, which supposedly would be the source of my slow drive and 100% CPU usage problems. Here is how I got there:

1) Right-click on My Computer and select Properties.
2) Select the Hardware tab and click on Device Manager.
3) Expand the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers section and double-click on whichever controller the CD/DVD drive is on.
4) Select the Advanced Settings tab and check the transfer mode.

It was indeed stepped down to PIO mode. I re-selected Ultra DMA, rebooted and benchmarked. My CD/DVD drive now works at full speed and uses very little CPU.

While I am glad that my drive problems were not permanent, I still have some reserve regarding playing Starforce-protected games again. There are four other computers in my household, all of which use their CD/DVD drive on a fairly regular basis for both reading and writing, and the only one to have had a step down is the fifth and newest computer, which was the one with the Starforce drivers. It would be a good idea for the developers to fix this issue - or at least double-check the protection's mechanics to make sure such a thing can't happen directly because of Starforce. You can guess this has spooked me for a while.

Best regards.

The drive could be switched to PIO mode only after numerous errors while accessing the disc. In most cases (more than 99%) the CD/DVD check passes without any errors (surely if the disc is original), so the drive continue to workw fine.

I removed Starforce and didn't play around with it for a while. I also went into my registry and took out any and all instances where Starforce was mentioned and whenever I knew I could safely delete those entries (e.g.: entries like "most recently opened files" had to remain intact of course.) I was stuck with a hardware wizard that pops up everytime I boot up my computer too. I disabled that device, to keep the wizard from always popping up - it's the last piece of Starforce I know of that's still on my computer. I can't delete it, as it causes the computer to re-detect it the next time I boot up.

In the end, the cause of the drive step-back was Starforce - I'm 99% certain of that. Thankfully, it didn't permanently damage my drive. Still, it left me with doubts about the protection scheme. What if my drive had been crucially incompatible with PIO mode, or what if I hadn't spotted the problem sooner? I was just about to waste money on a new CD/DVD drive before I finally discovered the PIO Mode at the last minute.

I decided not to take any chances - should I want to buy a Starforce-protected game, I will wait until I know there is a working crack for it. Not because I want to boycott the pirate the game itself; I will buy it as usual and thus give reward to the developers for making a game that has attracted my interest and hopefully will be fun - I don't want them to take the blame for a copy protection that works in odd ways, although I will express my discontent over that. I just do not want to mess around with Starforce again. I have paid for the game, I legally own it, the principle is there. There's really nothing more to ask for...