I bought Trackmania Sunrise and, as I always do, wanted to have an image file of it.
However, I'm not terribly keen on studying up in the latest copy control circumvention techniques. Actually, the best cd imager I have is CloneCD version 3, which should tell you I really can't be arsed to learn about the whole thing. I know I will have to, and probably sooner rather than later, at which point I foresee this board will be very useful to me.
Aaanyway, I gave the disc to a friend who knows more about bypassing protections than I do, and told him to image the disc for me. He gave me a couple of mds/mdf files. This was two months ago.
I was in no hurry to play the game immediately as I had something else on my mind at the moment *cough*Doom3*cough*, and later kinda forgot about it...
Yesterday I saw the mds/mdf files and thought I'd give the game a try. I mounted them with CloneCD, installed, ran the game and got a twisting feeling in my gut when instead of running the executable prompted a "protection installed" message.
I rebooted, and of course the game says "error" and tells me to put the CD in another drive.
I *could* just put in the original cd and play with that, but there are several reasons why I don't want to do that:
1) I always play my games from images; installing and loading is faster, and I can have one big fat hard disk connected through USB2 instead of multiple CDs and DVDs cluttering my desk;
2) It irritates me to no end that I am not able to run a backup copy of a game I've bought, and
3) Finding the disc in the mess that is my home would probably require a few hours of tidying, which I so don't want to do.
So I set out to crack it. A quick google search shows me that TmS is protected by that blasted StarForce protection I've managed to avoid until now. Searching for something with which to crack it turned up a rar contaning a "Starfuck" program that is supposed to run the game bypassing the protection and a tutorial (in french, no less; luckily I studied french a few years ago).
I did what the tutorial said, but the protection keeps giving me the same error message as when I wasn't running Starfuck.
So now I ask you: how do I get the game to run without Starforce? There appears to be no crack available in the usual sites, as weird as it may sound. It seems, therefore, that one has to find some way to dupe the game into thinking starforce is running and seeing the correct cd. Maybe I'm just not running starfuck correctly, has anybody managed to get it to work with this game?

Also: I understand Starforce has installed drivers in my computer that interfere with the working of my cd/dvd drives, and may degrade by a significant margin performance in other games/apps. I shudder at the thought of having to reinstall windows YET AGAIN after one week because of this. I want to remove starforce the moment I get the game to run. How do I do it? The add/remove software wizard has no mention of Starforce whatsoever. I gather I can find an uninstaller at starforce.com, but it seems it doesn't do as good a job as it's meant to.
Thanks...

See this thread .

The amount of work necessary for this is just ridiculous. I have better things to do with my time than spend it screwing around with my system in order to accommodate an intrusive copy protection scheme I didn't want in the first place. I'm having another go at finding a crack, but if I don't find it I'll uninstall the whole thing and run one of those specialized starforce removal tools, then I'll sell the game.

Another method to create Starforce (CD) backups is described in THIS thread.
All methods, sfcdvd+sfmdf, SFCure+'Disable node' and RMPS via USB/Firewire are history with new SF Frontline (at least with 3.7+3.8 as announced HERE)

SF Removal tool

There is even a more tricky posibility to get a working backup of a SF protected cd-title:
http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread....ight=starforce

Ups, Terramex was faster!!

Is this method still working with SF new update for CDs?

According to Morglum007, no
... even with modified tools new SF check can't be cheated by twinblocks.
I'm sure AlB or Morglum can tell you more about that.

Thanks for the info mate.

I've read starforce can be duped by burning the cds with Alcohol and running them on a USB external drive without internal drives attached.
It appears the protection can't get its info from drives connected through USB.
Is this true?
This wouldn't be a problem to me as my notebook has a pretty crappy internal unit and I'm using an external one all the time anyway.

The only gripe I have with this is that I need starforce installed, but since a simple run of the remover I found is enough to delete it it may not be so terrible.

*cough*

not version 3.5 3.6 3.7

Trackmania Sunrise has version 3.4.71.19. I assume it's feasible with that one?

Killing SF

mount image with Dt 4
unplug IDE devices
_________________________
slipknot666

Will do, thanks.

I downloaded and installed DT4, unplugged my onboard drive and mounted, but it's not working. It says "checking cd", stays still for a while, then tells me it can't identify the CD and to insert a licensed one.

*cough*
Where am I going wrong?
This version of starforce is even old, dammit... why isn't it giving up? >

Did you create the image with CloneCD? Because I think CloneCD can't read DPM data.
You need Alcohol or Blindwrite to create a working image.
I made my Trackmania Sunrise image using Alcohol, using the 'SecuROM *new* 4/5' profile and DPM at 16X. I chose to use the SecuROM profile because it has DPM precision set to high, while the Starforce profile only has normal precision.
But my image works fine with the SecuROM profile

I know I could change the settings for the Starforce profile in Alcohol, but I'm too lazy to do it

I have no idea what program was used as it wasn't me who ripped the disc... but I understand the mds/mdf extension combo is used by Alcohol, so I guess that's what was used.

Well then, follow Reefke's instructions and make your own. Then try again.

I'm gonna kill my friend.
Before I do that, I'm gonna have to find the disk, which may take me one to three decades.
Stay tuned...