Does Rainbow Six (1998) actually use SafeDisc?

[truegamer 0]

I own the original rainbow six and eagle watch on retail CDs but despite the fact that on the rainbow six pcgamingwiki page states that the game uses SafeDisc DRM the game still starts fine. is there some version out there that actually uses SafeDisc DRM?

[Garrett 220]

Yes, but going by the Redump dumps it looks like only some releases used it (it isn't mentioned for any of the Eagle Watch dumps). Going by the wiki, SafeDisc 1.x/2.x games have a file on the disc called SecDrv.sys; if your disc doesn't have that file it isn't using SafeDisc.

Many games also removed the SafeDisc check in a later patch (which wasn't necessarily mentioned anywhere in the patch notes), so those games run fine from a protected disc after patching. I don't know whether this is the case with Rainbow Six.

Back in the SafeDisc era, SafeDisc protection didn't always apply to all regions (this could depend on the publisher/distributor or other factors) and was often dropped for bundles and updated releases. Game releases that didn't use SafeDisc would often still have a basic disc check that simply looked for the necessary files on the disc (rather than verifying the physical disc's authenticity).

Things get even more confusing in later years where you find cases like a game using SecuROM in one region and StarForce in another (some older versions of StarForce don't work at all on newer versions of Windows whereas SecuROM versions from that same era should still work).