I'll only tell you what tools (but not where to get them) you may need, but anything to modify, break copy protection is against the law. However I still think there's a Fair Use Act applicable to this, that I believe should not allow Game Developers to control your Rights of what you do on your computer with a Game you legitimately bought (I am not the law though, so what I say maybe irrelevant) but being able to play a game without the CD is good, I have a nephew who has toddler games, that requires the CD and last time I let him play with the CD, it ended up inside the drive, requiring me to take the drive apart to get the CD out. So now I don't let him play with CDs at all.
First things first would be understanding whether this CD/DVD does have copy protection or not. A tool called A-Ray Scanner can check for most types of CD/DVD. You need to know what type of protection any CD/DVD has to understand what you may need to do to accomplish what you want. Not really necessary, but can sometimes help with ripping a CD/DVD.
You want a no-cd crack, easiest way would be ripping the whole CD/DVD (could use Alcohol 120%, Nero, CloneCD, Blindwrite) to your hard drive as an image, and using Daemon Tools or Alcohol 120% to use that image as a virtual drive, in which you can play the game as if the CD were in the drive.
If you're thinking of money trainers, or abilities to adjust ingame items etc, then I think Ollydbg would be your best choice, because you can test changing values inside the register during gameplay. I won't tell you how to do this though, as you still have to understand the opcodes and read exactly what the program is doing and you can easily crash the program or whole OS if you're not careful. You may need something that masks that you're using a debugger.
SoftICE is probably the best debugger you'd find and for dead listing disassembly, there's win32dasm. There's also quite a few good programs around related to such tools. As for a decompiler, I think you should avoid these, they cannot produce 100% compilable code, or even code that resemmbles anything like what the programmer would have written, there's just so many different ways they could do something, that it's hard to get back to source code. Assembly is the way.
If you do need a hexeditor, there's quite a few around and any hexeditor would do, though there are some with more advanced features, directly aimed at the sole purpose of modifying programs. So you should look around for these too.
Cheers,
MC
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), but if you keep cool and work an instruction at a time, you'll get there eventually, for most protections.
