NoDVD creation for rare games
 

Good afternoon,

Long story short, I'm a massive fan of the Tomb Raider series, and i've been learning Japanese for the past 13 years so I thought why not put the two together. After years of hard searching and buying, I've finally gotten every piece of my collection of Japanese dubbed Tomb Raider games. Alot of money spent, but score, I'm proud!

I detest playing games with a CD in. it's pointless and makes loading times ridiculous so I always search for a patch when I get a game and normally they work fine except in this situation.

My latest additions to arrive yesterday in the mail are the JP versions of Tomb Raider Legend, Anniversary and Underworld which cost me an arm and a leg due to their rarity. These games are all based on Securom protection so using virtualdrives etc.. make it difficult and either way, I'd rather just have a noCD patch rather than use virtualdrives.

I found a japanese blog online last night which actually showed me what Hex values to edit in the TRUnderworld exe. So I opened my hex editor, changed (like..3 values) and score, it works without the CD, no backup error or anything, yay! I went to do this to the TRLegend and Anniversary exe using the same value changes on the same areas but unfortunately didn't work.

Is there an easy way to find out how to do this for the other two games? I can't just download the NoDVD fixes (english nor multi) from gamecopyworld because this game is the JP localization, all the ingame fonts and audio end up being messed up if i use a different language exe. I need these original exes patched.

I have no idea about assembly, debugging etc.. so if it involves that, I might have to give it a miss and see if I could request it to be done. Is there a request form anywhere? I'd be willing to upload the executables themselves.

Kind Regards.

Zac,

can you paste the hex values etc...? sounds interesting, but sounds like a license bypass, as opposed to a crack (ie: protection would still be 'active'), then if you want, upload the files somewhere and i'll have a look and see what can be done :)

When I get home, I'll copypaste the hex values that were changed and upload the exes that i haven't been able to change. You're probably right, it may just be a license bypass.

Am I allowed to paste the upload links openly on the forum? Would you like me to upload the ones I changed aswell so you can do a comparison or anything?

EDIT: Hex Values I used for TRUnderworld (tr8.exe)

0096F046: 21 → 46
0096F047: 01 → 0F
0096FF90: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 → B8 CC B0 25 01 80 38 BE 75 07 80 30 20 C6 40 7F
0096FFA0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 → EB E9 C5 F1 FF FF
Source: Link (mostly Japanese)

Surely it can be done on the others, all 3 games use the same base engine..well I hope it's as simple as that aha!

Ok so I've attached them. The ones labeled untouched are obviously the originals that I haven't edited, the one labeled NoDVD is the one I edited last night which works fine.

If you find the time to lend a hand here, that'd be greatly appreciated.

Kind Regards,

Zac.

well, i see what the main problem is...

tr8 - securom 7.40.06
tr7 - securom 7.39.06
tra - securom 7.36.12

so, totally different versions of the protection, which would have different generated code, the actual tr8 patch looks like the person spent a hell of a lot of time figuring out the patch, so its not a 'portable' patch unfortunately :( which makes things a bit trickier

Gah how sucky! So that's a hint that its near impossible?

naw, not impossible, everything is do-able, but to do this for each one would require a lot of debugging... though in most cases the languages are in a different file, so the english crack might do the job, have you tried that? (or alternatively taking the resources out of the japanese one and 'importing' them into the english one might also do the trick)

Success! Used the english tra.exe crack, it works! Ingame text and audio is fine so i guess that means for that game, the resources a're 'external'. Tried same method for tr7.exe, no luck :( fonts and audio are still screwed. How could i go about importing/exporting resources as you say?

It won't help -- TR: Legend's exe is not unicode. I've had it with the Polish version, but on a smaller scale -- using the crack merely broke the Polish fonts in the launcher menu, not in the game itself.

Yeah that's exactly what happens to me. My next idea would be to hex compare the original tr7exe from the disk, to a nocd cracked version. This will prove difficult to find the correct almost matching file size exes hmm. By the way, i'm sure you know but there is a polish crack for trl on gamecopyworld i noticed it the other day :)

Oh my god, this is a no-CD patch without actually removing the SecuROM protection?! I'm throughly impressed!

[...] There are tons of programs for comparing binary files but there are only a few that can compare binary files of not the same size. I recommend xdelta: first, create a delta with xdelta -e -s SOURCE TARGET DELTA (replace uppercase words with actual filenames) and then have the delta "disassambled" with xdelta printdelta DELTA. The disassembly is quite cryptic but, apparently:
- ADD means copying data from the delta into the target, CPY_* from the source/target;
- S@XXX means XXX (decimal) offset in source, T@XXX in target.

6 years later and I'm back here again from my own google searching hah, nice! First guess on the password too.

I felt like it's worth a bump. A polish patch was released in 2018 by Prophet but, I haven't been able to get in touch with them. I've still got this Japanese game tightly securom'ed and not even a Daemon Ultra MDX does the job.

This EXE needs to be cracked - would be much appreciated by me, takes about 1minute to boot via the disk. Japanese font table not in Polish exe either, so that's a no go. It's a good version! much smaller, "Next gen" mode removed. Main game seems more stable no gameplay crashes so far. English and Japanese subs and voices interchangable in Options menu without limit (would love it to display both!!) Nihongo Masutaa ni naritai!