Anonymous edits have been disabled on the wiki. If you want to contribute please login or create an account.

Topic on Talk:SecuROM

Mirh (talkcontribs)

No, I'm not currently planning to write this myself, it was already gruelling to unearth everything at all and if I focus any more on this I'll explode (a second pair of eyes is always better too):

  • and conversely a list of blacklisted applications/drivers¿ (there were many disabler/hider countermeasures back in the days)
  • there's a trainload of stuff to say about the disk-related shenanigans (I'm not exactly holding my breath over much people caring by now, but still)
  • speaking of PA instead, activation tokens could also also have been invalidated by connecting USB disks
  • somewhat like starforce, they were faulted for what were actually Windows bugs (even though it did *once* happen it was them to screw up)
  • It was probably once they exhausted every possible "physical trick" to play with DVDs, that they resolved into just strengthening their VM and whatnot. I wonder if Denuvo isn't just the continuation of this, once the "take care yourself of ownership checks" aspect was dropped (anyway tokens and registry keys should be documented)
  • actually, the rabbit hole is even deeper: people figured out how to fake the online activation in the first place (known in russian circles as Тибериумный реверсинг, or "Tiberium reversing"). This is why they'd probably better burn down the entire thing and just move to anti-tamper (lucky for them, given in 2017 I tentatively believe something with their old official activation software was leaked)
  • Intel's errata doc isn't of great insight, and anyway they only started to publicly release microcode for Skylake with a hint of a changelog months later. After some tinkering though (I bisected GA-Z170X-Gaming 7 bios F3 and F4, and found a clear bug report placing a tighter lower bound) I could at least confirm this fix came with microcode, in either revision 2F if it even exists, or most definitively 3A.
  • What was the "SecuromVistaVersionLie" ACT shim for? Is it related to SecuROM7 (that to this day is still inside W10 32-bit AcSpecfc.dll)?
  • there's always that asterisk about older (oldest) releases possibly not working for real in modern systems. Is it a myth, or maybe could they employ some DOS/9x/16-bit voodoo? EDIT: well, Arabian Nights, South Park Rally and Populous III should be tested I guess. Maybe they relied on DOS interrupts or drivers once upon a time?
Mirh (talkcontribs)