New 'Alpha centauri complete' in stores

[El_Cid]

Park benches are good, especialy when the sun is out. Also the food is very cheap - just rummage in a bin

I dont blame you for not listening to me AC, after all i got you into Xcom with wild tales of adventure and it didnt float your boat, but ummm.....i told you so(about smac)

[Alinestra Covelia]

Okay, Jon Miller has the cure. I'm going to bivouac out at the law school. >_<

[Nugog]

You could just send the PC to me for safekeeping...................

[Alinestra Covelia]

Well the PC hasn't been unpacked from its boxes yet so it's in no danger of distracting me. Yet.

[El_Cid]

Have you managed to find anything yet concerning this?

I'll do some looking as well.

Ok i finaly got a message re this games DRM:

"Hi El_Cid,

Sorry for my delayed response. Alpha Centauri does use SecuRom copy protection, but this should not cause any problems providing you have no Virtual Drive Emulation software such as Daemon Tools or Alcohol 120% installed. If you are still concerned about using it, then in all honesty the only recommendation I can give to you is not to purchase it.
Due to the archaic nature of the original Alpha Centauri and the fact that we cannot support such a version, I cannot conclude whether the expansion pack will be compatible. Unfortunately I cannot test this solution here. You could try this. If the expansion fails to see the original copy then I’m sure this could easily be removed or uninstalled.
Kind Regards,
Matthew West-Robinson
Mastertronic Technical Support
--------------------------------------------------
Technical Support
Mastertronic Group Limited
2 Stonehill, Stukeley Meadows, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, PE29 6ED
United Kingdom
support@mastertronic.com
http://www.mastertronic.com/ (Sold Out)


RE Game Title: Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (complete)

Hi, I've just bought the new re-release of this great game(includes the Alien Crossfire expansion), and noticed a note on the back of the box stating; "this game contains technology intended to prevent copying that may conflict with some disc and virtual drives".

So is this DRM a form of SecuRom? I ask as I've had to buy two new DVD drives due to SecuRom in the past and now boycott all SecuRom titles.

I'm not asking you tell me exactly what DRM it uses just to let me know if it is SecuRom or not.

I have the original old game(non SecuRom) still installed(on an old PC), so is it possible to load the Alien Crossfire expansion onto that maybe? if i want to avoid putting nasty SecuRom stuff on my PC?

Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions you can give me,

yours sincerely,

El_Cid.

So no install for me! not that i have any of the stuff installed(or ever have, what the hell is Alcohol 120%?), but i do know SecuRom can be nasty. I think i'm going to try to install the Alien Crossfire expansion(comes on it's own disk in the box) over my original copy of Smac - if it works then i 'think' i may be SecuRom free. I'll even drop them a line letting them know it works if so.

[Alinestra Covelia]

I can't speak for your mileage (which I've been reliably told may vary) but I installed it and it worked fine for me. Whatever DRM protection they have is pretty unobtrusive.

X-COM from Steam was more DRM noticeable but all I noticed was that it loaded up Steam first. Maybe it's checking my account to make sure I did buy the game, which doesn't trouble me.

[El_Cid]

SecuRom is a funny one. It basicaly replaces windows dirvers on one level to a custom type that the copy protection checks against(i'm sure some experts can fill in better detials/correct any mistakes in my over simplification).

Now most of the time everything is fine, if not the internet would be FULL of angry people suing the arse of sony( i think it was their original idea as a system?), so you will proably be fine also

For me it took just one install of a SecuRom game and after a month or two i started to notice odd behaviour with my game disks and dvd-rom. Sometimes a game i would normaly play wouldn't run the cd-check - infact the dvd-rom would not even see the disk. So to check that it wasn't a faulty disk/dvd drive, i put it in another one of my PC's and everything was fine, all present and correct(just the PC was so old it couldn't run the game).

This started to happen to more and more of my disks. I then thought "screw it" and bought a new DVD-ROM, it was fine, for a few weeks then the same problem started to happen.

I should say at this point i had already done a system restore back to before i had installed the SecuRom game. Anyway..... so i just bought another DVD-ROM, maybe that other one was faulty?

Same problem after a few weeks and then I did some reading about SecuRom and decided it was/is the eViL! So i have two dead DVD-ROMs - the actual hardware doesnt work in other PC's either(which kind of freaks me out - how can it do that?), and eventualy i had to do a complete re-install of my system from scratch to get rid of the problem.

phew...sorry for that, but i think you should know that for most people it's fine, just for some people a real pain in the arse, and if it does ever happen to you, i'm sure you will join in the SecuRom boycotting

I'm all for Devs protecting their work, but this sytem can suck donkeys.

info on SecuRom(and other nasty DRM systems) can be found here:

http://reclaimyourgame.com/