Copy Protection Issues and Unreal Tourney

My latest homebuilt system has a Pioneer DVD-cdrom, and my mainboard is UDMA-66 (FIC-SD11 with athlon 550). I didn't have any installation troubles. I'm using a V3-3000, though, so I don't think I get the failure that TNT owners were suffering with.

About a month and a half ago I purcahsed Untreal Tournament. When I got it home and installed it, it failed to work for me. Basically, the software crashed my machine at the GT Interactive logo every time.

Unfortunely, after contacting technical support, I found out that Epic / GT Interactive are having a problem with the copy protection. The problem is as follows:

If you have a system with a UDMA-66 contoller and a DVD-ROM drive, the copy protection can not handle it and fails. However, rather than returning you to the desktop, your system crashes, causing lost file pointers in your systems FAT (file allocation tables).

GT Interactive / Epic are attempting to cover this up and keep it quite. They are not making a version of the game the does not use the copy protection, nor are they answering any questions about it. Meanwhile, I still can't play the game I spent $50.00 on.

According the GT Interactive Tech Support (CaveDog), the problem is with any UDMA-66 system.

If you are experiencing the problem, please contact me and let me know if you've found a solution for it.

I am currently considering legal action in the state of New Jersey to seek an injuction to prevent them from selling their defective product in this state.

Talk about no customer support.

Gerhard Bartsch

PS I've run testing on 4 PC's, and the software consistantly (100%) fails on the UDMA-66 systems.

[This message has been edited by HerrDoktor (edited 01-03-2000).]

Well, I DO have a GeForce card, but their tech support didn't mention anything. I hate incompetance.

Ok... I'll also look for the crack... but the bottom line is that it should be working out of the box.

Thanks!

Any other ideas all?

As with all new games no matter how hard they work to kill all the bugs before release there are always bugs. Most bugs dont crash you hard like this is doing to you but it can happen. You can bet that it will get patched, in the mean time make sure all your drivers are right and stuff.

If your not satisfied with your tech answer always ask for the techs team leader or supervisor they dont mind usually. There have been many times ive had to do this because I got a new guy who didnt know as much as I did on the subject, not that im all that smart.

The problem here is SafeDisc. It has to rank as one of, if not the, most annoying copy protection systems ever devised. Some reasons why are:

1. It's incompatible with some CD drives.

2. It's already a known system to crackers, so it's VERY easy for them to crack each new SafeDisc-protected game.

3. The spinning up and down can't be all that healthy for the CD drive.

One example of #2 is when Tiberian Sun came out. People asked where they could find a cracked version, and some (unscrupulous) people in the TS newsgroup simply pointed them to the SimCity 3000 crack, which apparently is a universal SafeDisc crack. (Both games are SafeDisc protected). Can anyone say D'OH!?

As much as I don't like it, I'd have preferred it if Epic went for a CD key system ala Half-Life or Q3. At least it would've resulted in less CD drive mashing.



It's the end of the world as we know it....and I'm still here.

I have a Celeron 466 with 128 MB, a Voodoo 3 and my hard disk is UTA666... and I thought it was funny that it took both UT and Tiberian Sun approximately 5 minutes to start up, with the CDROM (a plain 24x, no DVD) running mad.

Crack's where its at for me, I'm afraid... hopefully it doesn't interfere too much with any patches..

Regards,

Enigma}{
Edinburgh, Scotland