Anti-piracy measures, WTF?

I've just let a bit of wee out.

Doctor? wrote: Wemt out last weekend and offloaded £50 for two games, Crysis and Medal of Honour Airbourne, basically wanting something to give the new system something to think about.

I updated Crysis to the latest version, and sudden;y it wouldn't run, it just kept saying "conflict with emulation software detected", in other words, "you pirate bastard, you're running this off a downloaded CDImage and I can see you doing it!!!!!!"

I do have daemon tools, which emulates dvd drives. So I killed it. I also killed Acronis Trueimage's system service that allows you to mount your backups as hard drives to get stuff out of them, in case that was it.

Nope.

FUck it, I thought' I'll shoot nazi's instead.

Medal of Honour pulled the same crap.

Much googlage revealed that.

1. Both games use a copy protect system called secureRom.
2. Secure ROM sees all SATA DVD drives as Emulated devices (in essence, they ARE, but then so are the more common IDE drives, but nevermind).
3. SecureRom therefor assumes that anyone who owns a SATA DVD drive is a pirate.
4. The cure is to install the crack for said games.

Brilliant, their "protection" has lead to me paying 50 quid for games I can't play online or anything, AND since the things play with the crack, it's not actually done any "good" in terms of stopping cracked versions.

From now on, anything with SecureRom, I'm downloading.

Wankers!

cant get your fitty pounds back? prob not... so you nbought pirated dvd games, got jipped, am i rite/http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=10787616

oops brek windows of shop and haul ass of course wearing a boris yeltsin mask cos i hear there are cameras in engerla nd in everuy crevice. really sily but i dont care \

i dont care cos i,m not there i dont care if im here to morrow again andf again ive taken too m,uch of the things that cost you too much

Animadversion goes around breaking shop windows in a Boris Yeltsin mask? Oh lord , it just gets funnier and funnier

Talking of anti-piracy crap. Someone got me HL2 as a present, what, maybe 2 years ago? As Amazon's page didn't mention it needs a net connection to install ('cos of the Steam anti-piracy rubbish) I've never been able to play it as firstly I didn't have a net connection and then when I did its via my cheap out-of-date machine with nothing important on it.

This thread reminded me of it, so I dug it out of the cupboard finally connected my main machine to the net (something I didn't want to do, got the cheap ebay out-of-date machine solely for net use as a kind of 'air firewall'). Installing the damn game, with all the internet downloading and registration crap took like 3 hours, at which point I had no time to play the thing.

And now every time I boot up Steam tries to connect to the internet - why? And of course it means lots more CPU-cycle stealing crudware running in the background for no good reason.

Anyway, maybe I'll find time to play HL2 around the time HL22 comes out.

I'm sure this is the way the record companies would dearly love to go - connect to their server every time you try to play a track.

Do bother with HL2 it's a beautiful looking game and very absorbing.

I actually use Steam (it was the only place I could get Race-07 without ordering online), and these days it's FAIRLY well behaved.

Doesnae mean I let the sneaky cunt run at boot mind you.

Start>Run type "msconfig" Got to startup Have fun. Amazing what you can get away with preventing.

Don't bother with the services tab, in SoundOnSound they did an experiment, they killed/prevented 43 boot servies. The saved a "massive" 38MB of RAM, no noticable CPU overhead, and made their machine a drooling monster that was no fun at all to use.

Indexing service can go though. Note to MS: next time you steal an idea from those Linux "terrorists", try and steal the WHOLE idea. At 3am each day most linux boxen take an audit of their files. Then when you need to find, led's say "vanishing point", you can just type "locate vanishing" and get an instantaneous answer for all files containing that text. Windows spends 5 times as long indexing it's drives, then when you go to search, it ignore the database it built and starts thrashing through the disc again. Gives me ulcers that windows.

Though I'm downloading a hacked version which has been altered to caches the kernel and system in RAM (rather than forcing it to stay on disc....for no reason other than to slow your machine down).

Windows indego.

Well I finally found the option in steam that turns off run at boot.

Would certainly like to play hl2 but for lots of reasons its very hard to find the time these days.

And yea, windows leaves a lot to be desired. There's the whole Microsoft 'you, the user, are a moron and we know better than you' philosophy. For example, why does the 'find' option now require lots of unnecessary extra mouse clicks compared to win 9x? Just give me all the search options immediately instead of worrying about 'confusing' me, you stupid patronising OS.

And that f******* paperclip. Just sod off and stop getting in the way, you irritating animated piece of stationary.

404 error wrote: Well I finally found the option in steam that turns off run at boot.

Would certainly like to play hl2 but for lots of reasons its very hard to find the time these days.

And yea, windows leaves a lot to be desired. There's the whole Microsoft 'you, the user, are a moron and we know better than you' philosophy. For example, why does the 'find' option now require lots of unnecessary extra mouse clicks compared to win 9x? Just give me all the search options immediately instead of worrying about 'confusing' me, you stupid patronising OS.

And that f******* paperclip. Just sod off and stop getting in the way, you irritating animated piece of stationary.

Ahhhh clippy.

They made SUCH a big deal of his arrival. They made an even bigger deal when he died. He only lasted so long, cos he was Mrs Gates idea...."no clippy, no up the wrong-un Billy boy" Get into yer msconfig, cause damage, reclaim your DOS!!!!!!!