Copy Protection Problems in Win2000

[Yarlen 0]

Greetings all,

 

For the past several months as CD-based forms of copy protection (i.e., SecuROM, SafeDisc) have become an unfortunate industry standard, I've been unable to get any games to run under Windows 2000 Professional (SP1 or 2). Here's what happens: I can install a game fine, but when I go to run the program, it won't load. If I use a no-CD hack, games will run perfectly - so I know it has to be something related to the copy protection check. I have done some pretty extensive testing on this, spoken at length with people in the industry but to no avail on a solution. So, here I am.

 

Here's my system specs - all drivers and BIOSes are fully up to date, and programs/OS patched - also, I am not overclocking anything on my system or running any special programs: Intel PIII 933 Mhz processor, 256 MB PC133 SDRAM, ASUS CUSL2 motherboard (no onboard audio/video), TDK veloCD CD-RW (note: I have also tried 6 other CD/DVD drives, none of them resolved the issue), nVidia GeForce 3 64MB video card (v14.20 drivers), Hercules Game Theater XP (v2.02 drivers).

 

If anyone has any ideas or suggestions for how to resolve this issue, your help would be most greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks,

 

Yarlen

[whoisurdaddy 0]

I am not sure if I understood your question correctly but you are having problems with copied version of games right? If it is then you will have to use No-CD cracks for each of those games. It is not Windows 2000 related problem.

[JP- 0]

The way i understand it your having probs with the original cd version of the games, not copied, and the copy protection is the prob. This wont really help you much but i have had the same problem, not on my pc but on others, some using the exact same cd-drives and firmware so i have no idea what it is. The only workaround i found that even remotly works, is to disable dma on the drive, this worked for elite force and the new dune game, they would both refuse to work with dma enabled but worked fine with it disabled. That was only on 1 drive though, the same thing failed to work on others

 

And it is partially a win2k problem, because ive seen safedisc/win2k problems listed as fixes in certain patches.

[Yarlen 0]

M4Carbine understood my problem correctly - I'm using retail CDs, not copies. I've already tried disabling DMA, though, and that had no impact.

[JP- 0]

I had a quick look on there site, have you tried this?

 

http://www.macrovision.com/solutions/software/fix.php3

[Yarlen 0]

Hmm, just tried it but it didn't work.

[DosFreak 2]

Yes NT sees the errors on the discs and freaks out. Only solution besides the one posted above are cracks. Hopefully companies will me more alert once XP comes out.

[Yarlen 0]

This is very disappointing. I'll keep working on this within the industry and see if I can't get something done about it. Thanks for the info!

[Rune Moberg 0]

Quote:

Greetings all,
standard, I've been unable to get any games to run under Windows 2000 Professional (SP1 or 2). Here's what happens: I can install a game fine, but when I go to run the program, it won't load. If I use a no-CD hack, games will run perfectly - so I know it has to be something

FWIW: I have this problem with older SafeDisc "protected" titles. MacroVision made some changes two years ago (IIRC) that solved the major Win2k issues. Games such as Settlers 3 (I had to return it), DiscWorld Noir (I aquired a crack) and a couple of others released around that period of time, simply wouldn't run properly.

Oh, the reason I returned Settlers 3 was that they opted to introduce seemingly random errors (iron turning into meat IIRC -- a play on the phrase "pig iron") if the copyprotection scheme thought you were playing with an unoriginal CD. What a waste of time that was on my part trying to figure out what the h--- was wrong! :-(

But there are still issues. E.g. some Dell laptops (I think certain Latitude models) running NT4 will simply bluescreen if you try to install from a SafeDisc "protected" CD. Dell refuses to fix the issue, and surprise, surprise, the game publishers refuses to remove the SafeDisc "protection".

I'm sure that if you look into this, you'll discover that the time and resources spent on support alone wrt the SafeDisc "protected" software titles far outweighs the potential loss of sale had they not been "protected" in the first place. Specially seeing as SafeDisc "protected" titles makes the customer feel like a thief. I.e. you're suspected of wrongdoing already before you buy the title.

--
Rune

[Yarlen 0]

Hi Rune,

 

Thanks for your comments. I'm playing new games and I'm not having any luck at all, but I've gone back to using no-CD hacks again so I'm getting by. I heard back from a couple of my programmer friends in the industry and they told me that 90% of the programmers they know in the industry detest CD copy protection because it doesn't work. It's the corporate managers that are taking Macrovision's line of crap hook, line and sinker.