I am trying to use an original game without the need for having to use the CD to play, for personal use. Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance! I will be the only person with access to it. I need to learn the skills though. I need help about how to go about doing this.

[note=mastercomputers]I've altered this to reflect what he wants, but modifying any .exe file is illegal, so try to provide alternatives than this means. He will have to learn the other procedures elsewhere unfortunately.[/note]

which game is this ?
You should also look at your local legislation things. For instance, in France, it's forbidden to crack a game even for your own usage. And the guy who helps you doing this will go to court with you.

Yes, inform yourself before even trying it.

Hope I'm not breaking any rules here, please moderate it if so.

Anyway, first thing off, when/if you go for it, identify the copy protection on the game. This can be done with numerous software, or googling about the game.

After you know it, if you don't have any info on how the protection works, you have to disassemble the .exe, where you'll get an ASM (assembly code) dump. Check the hex codes for the instructions you wish to manipulate and then using a hex editor, either change the operation codes (opcode, or in english, the hexadecimal corresponding to the binary code that encodes an Intel 386/686 machine instruction) to what you found about, or you'll have to go on a blind search. Mostly what you do is change the conditional JMP (for JuMP) instructions to either jump to the place regardless of the condition or based on the negation of the original condition. A good tool might be Hackman (google it up ) and there's a few others but I guess it'll do for the most part.

It's tricky, and you'll take quite a while (mostly because it's not a user-friendly process - fortunately ), but if you keep cool and work an instruction at a time, you'll get there eventually, for most protections.

If the protection is Starforce 3, forget about it, it takes a full time experienced team working on it and it can take up close to a year even in those cases.

If you want to diassembe game, the best software to do it would be win32diassembler or softice.
These are the best in the field of diassembling or reverse enginereing.

But, as others are saying, beaware of local laws, because without local laws you are forbidden to alter change or diassemble software if author of that software forbid that in license agreement...

I believe "micro" the gm, would not approve talk about cracking anything in this forum community, I suggest you delete this topic or you will be warned. I know one of the GMs on here will tell you eventually that any talk about cracking anything is not allowed, but I reccomend you use google as your primary research tool for whatever it is you are trying to do.

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

The game is ToCA Race Driver 3. I cant figure out what protection it has on it. Daemon and Alcohol don't work with the Image and the only way around this apparently is to unplug the disc drives while the emulators are runing. I need those drives however so you can see my predicament. Anyways, if you have specific advice for me, dont hesitate to email me or add me to your MSN friends list.

The protection is Starforce 3.x+, which I can tell you has been worked out though you need the right tools. Keywords you may want to look for are "profiler" or "alcoholer" which configure the tool you're using to do what you are trying to do.

The fact that Starforce looks for something specific on what all CD/DVD Drives has, is the reason why disabling them, even inside windows should work (I'm guessing).

Cheers,


MC

what kind of protection does the tool called "tool called A-Ray Scanner" detect ?

Ok. Thank you MC. Now I just need to know how to use the $%?& thing. I swear, what makes people want to do this anymore anyways? it si so frustrating to see stuff like this going on with these games. Oh, and MC? You have to physically unplug the drives with Starforce 3.x+. $%?& thing. Is there any way to fool said protection? If there is, I am all ears. For anyone wanting to help with this, grab my MSN address so we can chat. I prefer realtime discussion.

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