Heroine Anthem II may be dropped

I used to really like StarForce. A protection no one has ever been able to hack out of a game — ever. In fact all anyone has ever managed was a lame-duck trick of pulling out IDE cables which has been stopped in the latest revisions of StarForce.

Then came today.

No, my key CD was not scratched. No, I didn’t encounter something I couldn’t hack in the game because of the protected CD. My computer would flat out not boot. Whenever I install any StarForce 3.0+ protected game and StarForce loads its drivers onto my system, my computer becomes tanked. It will not even boot past showing the Windows wallpaper (before logging in). At that point my hard disk goes silent, all goes silent. Windows hasn’t even booted far enough to accept CTRL+ALT+DEL forcing me to manually power off.

For reference, I have a Gateway M460TX. It is running Windows XP SP2 (the factory installed OS). If you have any idea how to make this computer boot with StarForce, let me know. I tried it with and without a CD-ROM drive attached to the machine and it makes no difference.

As I just got this new computer, I will not be getting another machine for 4 - 5 more years. This means I will not have a computer that will run Heroine Anthem II again for another 4 - 5 years. Hopefully someone else can pick up my tools and continue the project, but it seems for now I cannot.

If you have any ideas at all how to get StarForce 3 games running on my hardware, let me know.

As an aside, this only applies to Heroine Anthem II. The first game has no such protections and will continue on as a project normally.

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