<sigh>

They did modify the protected files, protect.dll has been patched. Where do you think the cd-check is?

I don't believe in your psychological argument of "getting discouraged" by a post on a forum. If you really want to crack the protection, that's not the kind of thing that you worry about.
Besides, if you really do get discouraged by what I said, then it's probably better this way; you wouldn't have been able to crack it anyway. You don't learn to crack any serious protection overnight.

BTW, e-mailing groups for help is never going to work.. that's like e-mailing Microsoft, asking how they programmed feature X,y,z.. they won't tell you.. Groups are competing (against other groups & protections) and keep the knowledge for themselves.


You did not understand what I said about the drivers. I am well aware of what they are doing, and they are playing an *ESSENTIAL* part in the protection.
For example, they are responsible for (but not limited to):
- heavy anti debugging
- all ring3 and ring0 hooking (ex: S-F virtual file system, anti-emulation)
- ...

*From the assumption that the crack was driver-based*, then all games would be unlocked:
The drivers are generic and backward compatible. Since a driver must work on gameX & gameY without change, cracking the driver for gameX means gameY also works.
That's all I said. You can't just cut what I say in the middle and then draw bogus conclusions.

If you really know how the driver works, then tell me how the ring-0 anti- NTice works.
Start your reasoning from ring-3 protect.dll all the way to the point the ring-0 check occurs.

Btw, Ultima hooked the starforce VM function table.. (largely responsible for the interpreter's behavior) hats off to them for that. They also seem to know pretty damn well the p-code instructions because they know what to do when the script is at particular places...
This is not a new idea, but I haven��t seen anyone use it in a crack, because as soon as you do, you let everyone (including star-force) know how you cracked their protection. As I stated above, generally people want to avoid doing this simply because the protection is going to change now that the information is available.