How to get rid of SecuRom, NOW

[Celestard]

I noticed MaxassSam was over here a few days ago. Probably checking the climate on people's attitudes--see if the Securom debacle is dying down.

I'lll never ever spend another dime on EA products or any software that has securom or starforce or any other crap they come up with stronger than SafeDisc. I'll pirate it and get a noCD.exe if I want it that badly which is what they--those in the gaming industry--deserve for putting that crap on our machines and then ignoring our problems.

I had a friend that said 'why wish a fucking on them? why not wish on them something unpleasant, like an audit?' So: Audit them!

All eyes are going to be on the tech section at that bbs when Free Time comes out with all new programming errors, bugs, glitches, and SecuROM damages. 

[Hegelian]

I first started programming in that on an Apple II in the local library when I was killing time waiting for my then-wife to pick me up after work.  My first computer was a Franklin Ace 1200, which was Apple II compatible and also had a CPM board in it so I could run Wordstar and SuperCalc. I remember when I bought it that the salesman swore to me that 64k RAM was more than anyone would need for the foreseeable future.

Heh--I had one of those too. Didn't need a CP/M board, but I had a Hercules display adapter so I could see italics and such in PieWriter. When I was no longer doing that work, I had to sell it to pay my income taxes (self-employed), but it and my Star Micronics dot-matrix printer remained in service for years afterward, printing product and tracking labels for a company that made cardiac catheters, using absurdly primitive BASIC routines I wrote for printing the labels.

My first programming experience was in a CS course coding Fortran IV on punch cards to run on a Burroughs 6800 (I sucked at it).   

Their machines are probably also riddled with spyware/malware, have a zillion toolbars in IE - because of course they still use that - take 10 minutes to boot and load 15 non-needed services in the system tray. The majority have probably completely failed to notice their machines are running crappily because for them that is the status quo.

Okay, wait. My PC takes several minutes to boot, and I don't have all that stuff—I actually know what I'm doing. But, um, my XP install does date from December 2003. . . .   

[cwykes]

The stupid thing about this whole thing from my perspective is that people who have always thought that no-cd cracks were an illegal, VBT only used by teens and techies are downloading their first ever no-CD crack to avoid Securom.  Will they stop with one?  Not likely.  So putting Securom on the Sims BV  in a move against piracy etc etc has been entirely counter productive.

[Zazazu]

The no-CD crack use to avoid issues with it really isn't the biggest problem. It's the fact that many of us now can't bring ourselves to support the francise, but still want the game. And we will get it, even if it doesn't involve money changing hands. 

[Spicey]

The no-CD crack use to avoid issues with it really isn't the biggest problem. It's the fact that many of us now can't bring ourselves to support the francise, but still want the game. And we will get it, even if it doesn't involve money changing hands. 

's'truth.

 

[Berney]

If you own the game, using a no-CD crack isn't illegal. It's only illegal if you didn't buy the game, but downloaded it or borrowed someone else's CD to install it.

[Jelenedra]

Duh.

But Maxis is trying to claim that using a No-CD crack at all is illegal, regardless of whether or not you own a legal copy.

[morriganrant]

I tried looking it all up when all this started. It'd damn difficult to find anything related to copy protection measures and the users rights. Never did find anything that gave all that much information or what I did find didn't seem to be able to back it up with anything official.

[Venusy]

General SecuROM question: all versions of SecuROM are bad, but are some (e.g. the ones included with BV/the BV patch/TSS) worse than others? Because something seems to have installed SecuROM v7.01 on my PC without me noticing it, but all the games I have on this PC are running fine even with DAEMON Tools running.

[morriganrant]

I thought that anything past Securom6 was bad. I haven't seen any reports of nasty behavior from anything before that. Although my Google-fu may be made of fail.

[Skye]

I wrote to the better business burea, and turned in the problem.  I had been one of those who they were trying to censor in all this.  Trolled many many times over it. Just because some don't have the problems doesn't mean we all were that lucky. They take great delight in putting us down over there. Anyways, here's the info for you to read:

On January 09, 2008, the business provided the following information:
Greetings,

If you have are not satisfied with the game play for the games you have purchased. You will be able to use our warranty information located in the back of the manual. If you no longer have the manual for the game you will be able to use the following link to locate the same information on the internet. Please click on the following link to http://support.ea.com/cgi-bin/ea.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=8947

Now for your specific issue, if you do not wish to communicate with our technical support team to with solve your issue. If your game is within 90 days of purchase and you have your receipt of purchase. You will be able to send your game to our Warranty group in exchange for a sealed copy of the game. This sealed copy of the game will be accompanied by a note from us asking the store to refund your purchase. If you do decide to use this method of return please include a note explaining what you would like to have happen. If you wish you can also reference this correspondence and my name. I am located at the same facility where your claim will be processed. So if issues do arise on this end I will be able to solve them for you.

Mailing Address:
Electronic Arts Customer Warranty
209 Redwood Shores Pkwy
Redwood City, CA 94065

Thanks!
Jeff
Electronic Arts
Not acceptible because the warranty has now run out on both games while waiting for an answer. What do I do with it once warranty has run out?
Technical support is not an option without the game in my machine, I was told. I turned in all my information before when I had the game in, and they lost my letter.
I would like to request, again, the game with another anti-piracy program in it. Just replace the disks, as I am fixing the computer myself.
EA wanted us to put the game back in so we could see what their patches do. My computer is out of commission right now.
I would also like EA to publicly tell us what is going on.
They are still continuing with this securom program, even though it is messing up even more computers. Many of us don't have a place to complain to that will listen. We are cut off now, not supposed to discuss it with each other now in the bbs area.

[Lorelei]

Better Business Bureau is a crock, alas. Try Bad Business Report online.

[Zazazu]

Good god, the Engrish in that reply letter is appalling.

[spursgirl]

Quick question... I'm installing Deluxe and the EP's (including BV) on a new machine.  If I just installl everything consecutively without running the game and then get a no-CD EXE for Bon Voyage, will that still ensure that I won't get SecuRom from Deluxe?  I swear I'll shoot fireballs at someone if I get it on my shiny new system.

[Zazazu]

Si. If you install both and then run just after installing BV, you'll only be running from the BV executable. The Deluxe .exe could be coded to tell your computer to explode, and it wouldn't care because it only looks at the latest .exe (the one you double-click to run the game).

[spursgirl]

Thank you Zazazu.

[SarahKjrsten]

I am not awesome.

I followed the directions and removed SecuRom from my computer (Vista), however, I have no idea what to do with a no cd crack. I went to the link in the first post, downloaded it and unpacked the rar file to my desktop, followed the directions in the first post to place it in C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2 Bon Voyage\TSBin after renaming the original file to have .bak extension. I double clicked on the new .exe for BV (I had previously moved the original .exe to my 'Unused Desktop Icons' folder so I wouldn't use it accidentally) and nothing happened. I tried double clicking it again and nothing happened. I brought up the task manager to see if it showed up, and when I double click, it shows up for 3-4 seconds and then vanishes and the game won't load.

What am I doing wrong and how can I fix it?

[morriganrant]

Delete your Groups.cache? Try that and come back and report. If you don't know how to do that then go here.

[SarahKjrsten]

Delete your Groups.cache? Try that and come back and report. If you don't know how to do that then go here.

That did it! Thanks very much for your help!

[morriganrant]

That's very nice hun, have you read the FAQs?

[J. M. Pescado]

See, Venusy? Your tactic doesn't work. Now we can't even blame people for not reading it.

[Zazazu]

Can we blame them for not being pervy enough? I'm disappointed in you, KiganMatsuei.

[SarahKjrsten]

I'm not 100% sure that this is a SecuROM issue, but I'm fairly certain it is.

As you can see by my above post, I managed to get rid of it and use a no-cd crack for BV to work. And BV worked perfectly until today. I purchased and installed Castaway on Tuesday, and today for the first time since installing Castaway, I went to play the Sims--and the game won't load. I'm starting it from the no-cd short cut, and it simply won't start. The really odd thing about it though, is that if I look at my task manager, it shows the game as running.

What can I do to fix what I've broken?

[kutto]

Delete groups.cache?

[PaganKitten]

I just got BV today.  I went through my Downloads folder and removed all my hacks, and stupidly started installing BEFORE I came here.  While waiting for the install, I started downloading all the BV-compatible versions of the hacks I use, and stumbled across an article with numerous comments complaining about SecuROM.  So I Googled 'SecuROM "ea games" ' and found a link to this thread (as well as a couple to now-locked BBS threads that complained of the usual Suck-u-ROM ills).

By the time I had found out about all the potential problems Suck-u-ROM can cause, I'd already run BV (without the no-CD patch) to see if it would work on my somewhat outdated PC (which is a different on than the one I use to access the intarwebs).  After reading this thread (and the ones on the BBS), I exited the game, ran Norton AV (no problems there), ran AdAware and Spybot S&D (no problems there), then started up BV again. It seems to be running fine, except that it paused for less than a second, about every five to ten seconds, during the loading screens.   But that could just be because I'm running Sims 2 on a 2 1/2 year old eMachine with a 3 year old NVidia card.

Apparently, I'm one of those lucky people whose system didn't get FUBARed in some way by Suck-u-ROM.  Does this mean I won't get rid of it?

Hell, no.  The fact that it has been installed on my PC without my permission pisses me off.  The fact that Sony has designed it to hide itself and make it difficult to remove makes it even MORE desirable for me to remove it.  I resent Sony and EAxis putting that kind of thing on my PC without even giving me the chance to refuse it.  Sure, I could have not installed BV in the first place, but I didn't know about this embedded software until it was too late.  Now, it's going to go the same way as any other malware that attempts to insinuate itself onto my computer.

And it's going to make me think twice about buying anything else from EA Games.