GameCopyWorld has now hosted the Eidos No-DVD patch, but it's nuked. Here is a copy of the email I sent GCW:
"The older No-DVD patch from Eidos for Imperial Glory had a time bomb in it and it will expire on Wednesday June 1st.
The one that is available direct from the SecuROM website has been changed and not only has copy protection, but has been altered to detect working DVD copies that had been working before.
In other words, I was able to make a working backup on DVD of Imperial Glory (1.0 US) that I bought. I had to have the disk in the drive, but at least my original was safe. I then saw on the Eidos forum (last Friday?) that they had a No-DVD patch for people who were having problems with the copy protection when the original disk was in the drive. I used this and it seemed to work great, until Sunday May 29. At that point a nag screen would appear informing me that "This license will expire in 3 days." The game will still run after this screen. I set my PC clock ahead and the license has indeed expired and the game no longer runs.
I re-downloaded the No-DVD patch from SecuROM today and now it says that it cannot find the Disk in the drive and it will not run. This happens with my backup disk and with no disk in drive. But it does run fine with the original disk.
So I went back to my original ImperialGlory.exe (which I had saved) and now it gives me the same error as the new No-DVD patch from SecuROM. So obviously this so-called patch has altered other game files to prevent people from using their backup disk.
From my own research I have found that a group called HOODLUM has apparently made a real No-DVD crack. I saw the NFO for it at
http://XXX.XXXXXX.XXX I haven't tried it because I have no idea how (or desire) to download warez. However, I thought you might be interested in looking into this.
I hope this information is of some value to you."
EDIT: Ooops...what month is it?
