DRM is dongle based - this uses a physical dongle somewhere on your LAN, using default USB mas storage drivers and a runtime encryption. You must have one full license on the dongle, but you can optionally add up to 7 more licenses at reduced cost allowing networked use by multiple users.
You can freely install SB on as many machines as you have access to, but you must have a currently unused license and the dongle present to launch the program. Personally I find this much better than limited activations/installs tying you to one machine, or requiring online checks/starforce or any other DRM I've had the misfortune to notice (usually by program unavailability/poor performance
).
Control requirements for SB are keyboard and mouse. A joystick is optional and takes over some functions. Many people feel that the mouse is easier - I prefer the stick. If money is no object then $1000 a pop 'AFV' controllers are available, but this is probably uneccessary
Track IR does some things, but is unsupported, and probably not very useful - you spend much time locked facing forwards in an optical sight.
Widescreen (like triplehead etc) should be much better supported than previously.