A Vampire's Story - RLD vs. VTY vs. DemoExe

[chron]

Hi,

I am not that far into reversing but the fight between Reloaded and Vitality seems to be rediculous. It's about the readnfos and propers from vty und rld for the Vampire's Story.

Vitality propers by a dumb reason. The game has a bug which provokes a crash on vista systems that is catched by the securom exception handler. That is why the unprotected exe crashes on vista systems after exiting.
VTY fixed the bug which is caused by a third party dll which has nothing to do with the copy protection. Also VTY has done an emu crack. In the past VTY propered RLD/FLT for creating emu cracks...

That was the vty stuff - going on with reloaded.

Reloaded never released a fully securom rebuilt crack in the last time, just emulated the vm which results in a bigger file size. But in this release there are not even securom pe sections.
Is it possible that they just took the demo exe and rebuilt the pe header so that the file looks different?
The demo exe seems to make the game fully playable with all movie sequences and save availability.
I rebuilt both crack and demo exe using LordPE which results both in exactly the same filesize but not same crc.
Maybe someone with more reversing skills could to check this.

Just my two thoughts...

[Muji-FightR]

I doubt RLD does that kind of shit, but then again maybe they ran out of skilled crackers...

I used to care about that sort of stuff, but lately I don't really care as long as the cracks work. An 'emu crack' should run about as fast as the protected game so I don't see the problem here. If it runs faster, that's great but you can't blame a cracker for not making it run faster.

Some might disagree, but those guys have a life to take care of too. Complaining about them not doing this and that and own a protection in every possible way is kinda inappropiate tbh.

[DABhand]

I think the thread is getting close to no no talk here.

Besides, most of the respected old timers who respected others are long gone its all kids now on their magical tour in ego-big-head land.

Also just because Securom PE headers arent in a binary doesnt mean its a demo binary either. The crc on both binaries are different probably due to a watermark left behind by the groups. Im sure they purposely change some opcodes to something different that does the same, so if another group attempts to use their work they can glee about it.

But again this is getting very close to closed thread I think.

[wolfsrain]

Cheers on that. There is no such thing as a scene left.
And their nfos are like a catfight. I'd smile if I'd really have something fun in there. But again, who cares about their petty fight...

[Joe Forster/STA]

I'll be a bit more cautious: I think the "don't look the gift horse in the mouse" saying applies here. We got all the cracks for free so we shouldn't whine about their quality, rather be grateful for getting some at all. I've done a few cracks back in the C64 and DOS era and, extrapolating from my own past experience and the trends, I can imagine how tough it became today.

Talented people are often arrogant. (I know as I'm both. ) They think too high of themselves, are too proud of their knowledge and skills, are workaholic (whatever their job is) adrenaline junkies and often refuse the opinion of others without even considering it (which leads to hatred, jealousy, flaming). At least, that's how the outside world sees them; of course, they themselves don't. Let cracker groups have their fun, whether pathetic or not in our eyes, if a useful side effect is that we can have fun, too, by playing games with the outcome of their work. And this comes from someone who's known about his complete inability for diplomatic behavior among his friends and colleagues so think about it...

By the way, there's nothing wrong with this topic. Discussing warez itself, related phenomena, coding skills etc. doesn't hurt anyone, including game companies from whose attacks we want to defend the forum.

[voodoo_nbgd]

Speaking of which, how exactly does an EXE with an emulated Securom virtual machine run "way slower" than fully rebuilt and cleaned EXE, as Vitality states?
I know the principles of running software inside a virtual machine, there has to be some slowdown because of an additional software layer, but Vitality earlier said in their NFOs that "some parts of code inside SecuROM VM run at only 200 MHz" (compared to which frequency?). This doesn't make any sense to me.

[Muji-FightR]

I think the 200 Mhz are compared to an average gaming PC, it's just supposed to show how slow code execution gets compared to what it would be without Securom (I think something about 20 times as slow would fit the comparison), I couldn't tell you any exact figures though

And Securom VM has got nothing to do with conventional virtual machines like Virtualbox.
It means converting code into something hard to restore, ie. code is transformed into something only Securom understands and converts it into actualy byte code executable by the CPU. While trying to confuse crackers they added random useless code, added shitloads of crc checks etc. Something as simple as a function call ends up as 20 VM instructions each consisting of 100 or more normal CPU instructions.

[newone111]

Can someone tell my why Vitality is never mentioned in the greetz-section of other groups' crack-nfos?
I've read somewhere, they were a sort of "scene-banned"?
If yes, for what kind of reason?

[Muji-FightR]

Apparently they threatened to betray someone to the feds, dunno if it was FLT they threatened or not. I also read FLT pushed the ban because of all the propers VTY was doing on their cracks, while they actually worked, VTY justifies their propers with their cracks being faster with the protection fully removed in contrast to FLT's/RLD's 'emu cracks' (see above).
Not sure which was the actual cause though...

[voodoo_nbgd]

Ok, thanks. But does Securom slows down real program's code even when running in "regular conditions" (which is when the game passes disc or activation check, etc), or it happens only in this "virtual environment" (that is, a VM-wrapped cracked executable)?
I mean, it sounds crazy if developers spend much time and money to optimize the game, and then ruin it all with a DRM software which adds useless CPU load and creates a performance penalty.

[TippeX]

some protections slow things down depending on whats done...
code converted to vm obviously runs slower because it has to be interpreted runtime
most of the time the unprotected exe will run faster, but thats a given really because there is no protection layer..

for example i had a game world in conflict, where i had the protected exe and the cracked one, the cracked one ran about 5-10 frames per second LESS than the protected exe.. and chances are high that the unprotected exe was faster than the protected one...

so really, for some cracks the method used to do the crack can result in the program running slower than the protected exe...

and the developers can also (judging from the sdk's i read) mark various portions of code to not be protected, vm'ed and so on, so they do have some control...

[EarlZ]

How about the Sacred 2 crack that reloaded released, the file size is significantly smaller than the original.exe

and in vampyre story, who has the better crack in the end ?

[TippeX]

significantly smaller is no indication of how 'clean' the crack is, some previous cracks used upx to make the exe smaller..

for me, using a demo exe as a 'crack' is pretty lame, and shows that the cracker(s) had little or no skill to do the crack cracking, or they could not be bothered doing the work and took the simple easy way to do the 'job'..

[EarlZ]

So in the end who has the better crack for this game, reloaded or who ?

[TippeX]

doesnt really matter who, whichever crack doesnt crash, performs ok etc is usually the winner.. if the crack removed the protection completely (ie: vm not emulated etc) and is good then it should be the winner... most people dont really care about this, all they want is a working crack... so the which crack is best scenario is really just a scene pissing contest...