SpellForce 2 (EU Version)

[Grumpy]

@Minkel

Hmm natürlich hab ich keinen key!!

1) My German is not good but I believe this says:
"Naturally I dont have a CD Key!!"
But I will let the German Moderator deal with you!

2) English only! Its an English only forum.

[Muji-FightR]

Almost right
natürlich == of course
which makes things a little more obvious

1€ Job, also sowas :/

[doomerdgr8]

X3 just got fixed good 'n proper...
There is always hope!

[MalevolentD]

I greatly appreciate the time and effort the staff and crackers put into making maxis, minis, and no-cd exe's for all of my (legally purchased) games.

That said, I have a slight problem....

I was given spellorce2 for my bday, last month.
Didn't ask for it, the lil woman overheard a friend telling me about it.....
Actually she heard the part right before "....I bought a 6800gt and it still doesn't work....".
It's the PCCD version, bought here in the United States...
I would've preferred the dvd version, not having to swap cd's 4 times with install. But what can you do, right?

I'm just curious, not being pushy or demanding...
If there is any recent headway on an image for this game?
And what can I do to help, not only myself, but the entire gaming community faced with the same problem.

I noticed that the MULTI and EURO images are DVD, and I knew they wouldn't work, but the adventurer in me just had to try.

I have a newer alcohol120, the latest DT4, nero 6.6, and a little determination.
If you gentlemen need me to run another application and tell (or send) you what the output is, I would be more than happy to...

To be clear, I'm not asking for/offering any assistance in copying the entire game, or allowing someone who doesn't own the game to install it.
Just a no-cd fix for the play disc (disc1) so I don't have to take my lazy butt over to my bookcase and get it out of the box everytime I have time to play it.

I've attempted to make an image of the disc1 with Alc120, and mount with DT4....
But I keep getting the dialogue box saying "Please insert original "Spellforce 2"cd/dvd" (and of course, 'OK" button)

So much for the easy route huh.
I've read through all 8 pages of this thread, and didn't see anything specific about the PCCD version.
I understand it has TAGES protection, although I can't begin to tell you what that means except something about an 'area' of specific data found in a specific place on the CD.

Maybe I'm just too tired and overlooked something, if so I would greatly appreciate any feedback on this, including criticism.
Please feel free to be as detailed as possible.....

Again, Thanks.
MD

[TippeX]

tagés is not a special ring on the cd, its duplicated sectors, one sector containing bad data, the other containing good, the driver handles the requests and reads the right sector (in a backwards fashion... ie say it wanted sector 100, it would seek to sector 101, then read backwards, getting the real duplicated sector, normal cddrives read forwards, so without the real cd, you'd read the crap sector... = game over

[MalevolentD]

Wow, fast reply, nice.
Thanks for the correction, 'ring' isn't the correct context I was going for, 'area' would have been a little better.

TAGES sounds like a real bear....
How does one go about finding the affected sector(s), and once found, successfully creating an image to mount.

Dealing with this brand of copy protection, what is the chance of getting a no-cd exe, as opposed to a mini.
Assuming the game doesn't need any additional information from the CD, besides the protection required at the startup.

I'm far from expert in this area, I could be completely wrong, but it almost sounds easier to neuter the appropriate files to not look for the play disc.....
You guys are the Pro's, I'll believe whatever you tell me.
If theres any way I can be of assistance, by all means let me know.

[TippeX]

you're asking 2 different things....

1. no-cd exe = protection removed...
2. image of game... maxi or mini.. doesnt matter, there is currently no software at the moment that makes an image for tagés protected disks, it can be done however, but usually requires a lot of time , a lot of trial and error and (non public) dedicated software

the game DOES require extra information from the cd/dvd, some of the game code is actually located in these 'dupe' sectors, and loaded runtime, ie: as you're playing the game, so technically the cdcheck could happen whenever the coders want it to happen.. tagés is implimented at source code level

someone who makes a maxi/mini/whatever image is NOT a cracker
someone who removes the protection code and makes a working executable IS

there is a huge difference between the two

chances of getting a tagés crack / no-cd/dvd exe = same as getting a starforce crack or whatever.. all depends if the cracker could be bothered puting the time and effort into it...

any assistance... doubtful, no offence but you couldnt really assist given the fact that you know very very little about the protection...

all you can do is be patient and see if a crack ever does happen for the game, or if some software arrives that can make tagés images...

and before you ask, nope i cant get involved in cracking/helping to crack it.. sorry