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Anyone out there good at cracking games, or fixing the for "Diciples of Steel" as it is? It catches the crack one you proceed a certain way into the game, and then it essentially erases your characters and makes the game unplayable (piracy message says CRC Steel.EXE and then some piracy stuff). I'm no hexeditor, but maybe the giveaway code is in the .SAV files or .CHR files and can be erased or changed, or maybe it can be erased from STEEL.EXE? Or are the answers to the copyright in there (although this wouldn't fix saved games made so far).

We need a 1990's programmer!

[Eagle of Fire]

First: moving this to the Favorite forum.

Second: we need to know if this game is Abandonware before even thinking about helping you. And I can't find that game in our oldwarez list...

[The Fifth Horseman]

EoF: You cannot, but it's already up on the site.

[Eagle of Fire]

Mmmm, strange. I get no results when I type Disciple but I see it when I type Steel in the search function. Maybe I mispelled "Disciple" in my first search...

[The Fifth Horseman]

Probably the search engine accepts only full words - just like the one on HOTU.

[a1s]

no, it accepts any part of the word (incljuding just one letter) obesrve here (I serched for just "dis" and it found the game in question.)

so... <looks at the nametag> Guest, what seems to be the problem with the game?

[The Fifth Horseman]

According to him, the copy protection in Disciples of Steel is two-fold, the second level being a checksum of the executable that activates at some point far into the actual game.
If the game detects the checksum to be incorrect, it crashes and refuses to run afterward, displaying an anti-piracy message. Additionally, it corrupts all the existing save files.

Nasty stuff, in all extent.

[a1s]

does anyone know how what the checksum is? I mean what it equals to.

as a temporary measure I think I still have the version they had on HOTU (it's pretty small so I probably didn't delete it), so if someone wishes to test that one, just drop me your e-mail and I'll send it to you.

[The Fifth Horseman]

We don't even really know what method is used to calculate it.

[a1s]

well the common ways are size check (which is what they used in DOS system files) and and sum check (the amount of 1s in the code), which is what they use in most internet transfers (allthough it's more common to do take the redundant (am I using the right word?) from divison by some large number).
to find these thing out we are going to need the original .exe file (we didn't chnge anything else, so it must be this one). any Ideas?

who is this Raastad, anyway? why have I never hear of him? :blink: