SolidShield

General Information

DRM made by the British company Solidshield Technologies Ltd made in partnership with Franch Tages SA (Who later bought Solidshield Technologies and renamed themselves after it). Comes in two versions; v1 and v2 where v1 existed either as a companion DRM to TAGES or utilized online activation while v2 exclusively used the later.

Identification

Solidshield can primarily be identified by the presence of a DLL either loose on disc or inside the games install folder that went by many names. Including but not limited to "hc.dll", "tdvm.dll" and dvm.dll", "activation.x86.dll" and "solidcore32.dll". The online activation version will in addition also have an activator called "SolidShield Activation Manager" or "SolidShield Activation Wizard".

Dumping

SolidShield v1: When not using the activation manager v1 was exclusively used as a companion DRM to TAGES, so see that article for dumping instructions. If using the Activation manager just dump it like a normal disc.

SolidShield v2: Dump it like a normal disc. Servers are still up as of time of writing.

Additional Information

SolidShield v2 was relatively modular and has been found in combo with other DRM such as SecuROM, Origin and Steam. This does not affect dumping though.

Sometimes SolidShield v1 related files will be present on disc without TAGES mastering. And if that's the case it should be marked down as remnant.