Ok, here is the deal. You know how on the internet you can find tons of "No-CD" Programs that allow you to run games without having the CD-Rom in the drive? I was just wondering, how would one go about programming something like this. For example, I'm one of those people that absolutely hates installing a program completely on my hard drive, yet still being required to insert the CD, scratching my precious disk, really annoys the crap out of me. So basically, I'm asking, how would one go about programming one of these no-cd crack programs? I'm not looking to distribute it, I'm not looking to give it away... I'm just looking to prevent myself from having to insert my CD every time I want to play a different game.

FYI... the particular game that is giving me the headaches is NWN: SOU v.1.32. Gamecopyworld has the No-CD, but I get a CRC error on it. Does anyone know how you would go about programming one of these?

I mean, theoretically, wouldn't it be possible to just write something along the lines of a "ECHO SERVER" or something stupid like that... just give the program whatever it is looking for. All the program does is check the presence of the CD-ROM... if I can simply intercept the "Return Zero, the CD is not present" and replace it with "Return one, the CD is present", everything will be perfectly fine, right? Not easy to do, I know... but theoretically possible...

And the problem with reverse-engineering, is that it would require you to recompile the executable, no? Not exactly an easy thing to do in many cases...

EDIT: Actually, there is a way to do ISO emulation on windows, Called DAEMON tools... the problem is though, I already have the entire contents of the CD-ROM on my hard disk. To have an ISO would be a replication of that data. I'm trying to reduce Hard disk usage here, not duplicate the data accross the drive twice.

EDIT2: Although a simple ISO emulation doesn't work with SoU... it hangs at load for some reason. Quite strange. I belive it has something to do with the copy protection corrupting the ISO when you rip it from the disk, but I'm not positive.

With reverse engineering you do not recompile, or, at least, it's not required. You should in theory be able to just change the bits that need changing (which you can identify with a exe->asm tool) in the appropriate fashion, then run the new exe. That said, there should be no problem with recompiling; if you can translate the exe to asm, I don't see why you couldn't do the reverse! The real problem is that the program can add measures against reverse engineering like checksums, which will, though not unbeatable, make your life even more of a pain.

Anyway, I think that the game, if it has decent copy protection, will actually read some values from the CD on boot to check that it is THE cd. I mean, can you have just any old cd in the drive at boot, or does it have to be the right one? Anyway, in theory I suppose you could intercept communication between the cd device driver and the game, memorizing only the info the game sends to the cd and what the driver sends back. Then you could write a fake driver that replicates that limited behavior.

The problem is that SoU doesn't even work from a copy... it is really screwed up. You can copy the disk all you want, and it doesn't function correctly. (or so my computer-semi-litterate friends have been telling me). They have some friggen evil protection on it. I mean, if I could simply copy the disk I wouldn't be that opposed to just making a copy and using that CD until it crashed and burned... I'll give clone-CD a try when I get home... hehehe...

Zaphos-- note "the CD is ___" not "a CD is ___" It is very important to notice the redundant words in my sentences...

Too bad there isn't a way to just "step over" the code in the program when it occurs... so when it pops up with the "We cannot locate teh CD. Press a key to quit" dialog, you just hit alt-f10 or something stupid like that right over the top of it until it gets to the next part of the program... Well, that would work for scripting, but not for Machinecode... oh well...

Better luck next time.

The general process for cracking a cd-protection scheme, is to simply find the code that does the check and jump over it. Finding the parts of the code that you want to skip is the hard part, since it's all machine code.

One program that lets you step through machine code is SoftICE. It's originally designed for debugging drivers and other kernel-mode stuff, but would work well for regular programst too.

However, I doubt that you're spending as much time swapping CD's as it would take to crack a program yourself. Just try searching harder for a crack.

As he mentioned before, ISO's take space.

Btw, I hate to admit it, but this is still illegal thanks to the DMCA.

At about $10 a CD, that's closer to 20 CD's. (13 actually, but I didn't quite make $200. About $170 after taxes)

The CD's I bought ranged in price from $7.99 to $13.99. All brand name labels, too.

Price of CDs went down a lot.. otherwise I wouldn't have considered it.

Canadian currency, of course.

Personally, I don't care.
It's illegal to J-Walk here... but that's not going to stop me from doing it at 3am in front of a police car.

As long as you actually own the CD you have an ISO of, this easily falls under Fair Use (though, using CloneCD or some other software to rip the ISO could be a violation of the DMCA... probably one of the most retarded things about it; it circumvents Fair Use). Of course, you can't give away copies of the ISO or anything.

Running a game with daemon tools doesn't really qualify as circumventing the copy-protection (and, as such, violating the DMCA), since it's entirely extrenal to the program, and simply simulates a physical CD-ROM in software.

Making your own No-CD crack, on the other hand, is definantly illegal under the DMCA.

It isn't supposed to be illegal. But, the DMCA has been used to bully discussions/seminars/etc. on breaking copy protection into stopping before. Though, I kinda doubt ML's webhost will get an e-mail telling them to take his site offline because of this forum thread...

-Maverick

LSd016: Try ClonyXXL if you haven't already. If it still says Securom, try UnSecurom (unless, of course, you have tried that too already ).

I'd say your best bet is going to be finding another crack. Unless you know assembly, have winasm, softice, and a myriad of other tools...yeah, you're not going to want to try to crack it.