hacking games with starforce

[Hexana]

Additional question:

Besides starforce, here in Germany a lot of new games also use
VOB ProtectCD 5.x

Is this thing similar to starforce3 or what are the differences?
It seems that this one doesn't install permanent drivers in the windows system like starforce or am I wrong?

In most cases there are also no cracks available for those games (e.g. Port Royale)

[michse]

VOB is kinda simmilar to SF3 but SF3 is a way much better coded as it doesnt take so much resources as VOB does. But VOB isnt a so much found Protection at all. The last Games i know are Port Royal 2 + Arena Wars from Ascaron and Holiday World from Brigades.

The similar thing is they both used special drivers but VOB can always be copied with the same trick what for SF3 isnt possible. SF3 you either have a good burner or are skilled enough to patch the installed .sys file from SF3.

The difference is: VOB from Ascaron is filled with hidden checks (crc, size, date, etc.) or like in Arena Wars a non original exe cant play online in any way. Maybe u ask the main creator of SF3 as he did the most VOB cracks before
Its a lot of work too and their are to less people that try themself and improve on trying. Most people simple leech via p2p and dont care how much work crackers invested and that they might need help and new talents.
Its like in sports ... only if no new talent arrives the ppl start crying ... but i dont see alot of people here that exchange infos about their trys .... its always i nedd, how do i, and so on ...

to Morglum007:
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i hope it gets done before the russian freak finds something new as
i hate games like D-Day German where you dont see an end during debugging

Good luck on it.

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btw. Tages is a lot harder as you hae to play the game to finish as it gets only decrypted level by level

[michse]

morglum i have a question...

Is it possible to get 2 tools done that do the follwoing

1st one is a dumper/logger that returns some offsets or so that explain the point where it goes into protection checking and the offset where its passed with result CD is Ok?

2nd one is a loader that bypass the protection check and jumps to the point in mainexe memory where the protection check has returned result ok

it was already used for some VOB 5 games like Port Royal 1 as u might know

[guod]

But then, the next question will be, who's going to have the guts to read through 500+ MB of logs to figure it out?

The cd-check appears to be quick because star-force is running at an absolutely high priority level... ever tried moving the mouse while the cd-check is running.. slow eh ;p It would probably take a few days (non-stop, and at a good speed) just to trace through the cd-check once.

[michse]

well if it would be easy we would see such tools already spreaded and have for sure new updated SF already from the russian freaks.

But coding a dumper that hooks every pcoded function no matter if recent for protection or not is also a hard job.

Such a tool might be coded for already cracked sf3 games and then we could learn from the logfile what we have to seach. There are some of them already and it doesnt matter if it has pcode or not with such a loader and as you dont patch the main files it gives you the chance that hidden checks or something like this can be stoped. A NoCD might be difficult then when addional simple cdchecks are in the game but who cares if you can run from a mounted image from original CD. HDDs are big and so a image can be stored and the orig cd can be placed save into the box again. I hate it when CDs go bad like my Soldiers and Toca 2 and companys doesnt do a **** to give you a new one when you ask, they simply say you buy again. grrr

[ash2dust2]

Thanx for the info. One of the more intelligent threads. Maybe worth a stickey so we can point all the monkeys requesting SF3 cracks to this.

[ava978]

I always purchase my games! My friends too, but we had to get THOCA and Soldiers-Heroes of WW2 two times before they worked.The way i see it (and my friends agree) SF3 is created only to suck more MONEY from us! This, and i hope U feel me is NOT good at all!