Recently purchased Still Life from Dave. Game loads but will not play; goes to black screen. Using a Win 7 machine, Intel Core 2.9g, 4.00g RAM, 70g free hard-drive space, Nvidia gt-240. Tried running as administrator. Couldnt find Still Life in Win 7 compatibility list in Glitches forum. Anyone have suggetion?

The disc version of Still Life uses an old version of StarForce that won't work on Vista or Windows 7. The newer versions of Windows don't allow it to be installed. This version of StarForce doesn't install at the same time you install the game. Instead it installs the first time you try to run the game. That's why the game appears to install correctly, but won't play.

You can try using a nocd. Do a Google search for
Still Life nocd
to find a nocd and follow the instructions.

I recommend getting a DRM free version of Still Life, like this one
http://www.dotemu.com/en/download-game/156/still-life

Thanks for this insightful reply, Jennie. I havent tried dotemu yet, but have had great success with gog. One question if I may: GOG offers a downloader, which is absolutely necessary in my location. Does dotemu have a downloader available? Thanks...

Edit: I notice dotemu's prices are quoted in Pound Sterling. Think they'll accept dollar denominated paypal?

They did for me, and charged $8.43, which is slightly less than what GOG was charging. And GOG seems to be down at the moment. I'm getting a blank page when I go to gog.com and try to click on things. I think they're still working on their website.

I wrote to support@microids and they sent me what appears to be a patch; a zipped file named Still_vista7us. I extracted the file (still_vista7us.exe) and tried to run it, and I get a message "game is not searching". I wrote back to microids support but I was hoping someone on this forum may be able to help... thanks!

Did you try copying their file to the game folder before running it?

That specific patch is nothing more than a NoCD patch - it does work, but has issues.

In order to run the game you will need a NoCD patch. Use the Google search Jenny suggested.

Jenny and Inland, thanks. I tried copying the patch to the game folder-- no help. I then googled still life nocd and tried several of the patches--no luck. Following their instruction to reboot then run the game, it appears that Starforce is being re-loaded every time I start the game. Looks like its on GOG, I'll just download from there.

LOL - love that statement

That's one way to do it.