Starforce legacy game support

[stixholder]

Feature Request

I confirm:

• [x] that I haven't found another request for this feature.
• [x] that I have checked whether there are updates for my system available that contain this feature already.

Description

Proton should add support for installing (external) games with (legacy) 'Starforce copy protection'

Justification

Proton dev team obviously greatly relies on contributions from Codemasters, which is a game vendor, that's been using this technology in the past and should have the knowledge of how to make it work in Proton/Wine. Probably also still has helpful connections to Starforce.

Without supporting Starforce, it already has, or will become impossible, to play older, but still worthwile titles, such as 'Worms 4 Mayhem', due to EoL'd native operating system versions (e. g. Windows 98 or XP).

For the mentioned title, it's possible to install it in Wine 6.x and also the corresponding Starforce driver, but when trying to run the game, 'Worms 4 Mayhem' will repeat to ask to finishing the Starforce driver installation by 'restarting Windows'.

Since Codemasters is involved with Proton, they might also opt for a probably simpler and more sensible approach, by releasing Starforce removal patches, for legacy games in question and an option in Proton, to manually run and install executables / patches.

Risks

Might require introducing (at least in parts) malicious, trojan-like features to the Proton / Linux environment. But then again, Steam probably also already does (VAC, data profiling).

References [optional]

[stixholder]

Has anybody a clue, about whether this feature is feasible, and if not, why?

[kisak-valve]

Hello @stixholder, do you know of any games on Steam which use this DRM method? If there are none, then this is simply not a priority for Proton devs to work on and should be evaluated in upstream wine.

[stixholder]

Well no, I don't know about games downloaded from Steam.

But, Codemasters', to my knowledge being involved in the Proton development, they should be able to determine this for some of their titles. I'm not sure, if "Worms Ultimate Mayhem" is just a rebranded version of "Worms 4 Mayhem", but it sure would seem to stem from the same code base.

Also, codemasters should have the required know-how regarding Starforce, since they've been using it in the past. If they'd rather choose to contribute this knowledge directly to Wine, that's fine with me. But I don't know, if they'd generally do so, and I certainly wouldn't know whom to address this issue to.