NoCD version

[milo]

Yikes! I didn't realize that the NoCD stuff was a CRACKED version - I thought PopTop had just quietly handed out a version without the copy protection to customers with older CD drives. Startled the hell out of me to discover the MYTH/DEViANCE tag right after the segment table.

Good news is that the differences give me some good ideas how to add new code segments to the existing executable. Bad news is that there are a lot of spots where the patch could have disagreed with the crack. Fixable, but... well, give me another couple of days.

[milo]

First attempt at NoCD support is out. Looks as if it may just have been the version stamp change in the .rsrc segment that caused problems. The NoCD RT3.exe moves that segment several hundred thousand bytes up. Rest of the deltas remarkably don't seem to collide.

[milo]

Thanks milo/. I'll give it a try tonight.

Just curious though, why is the NoCD version so much smaller (~3Mb vs > 4 Mb) than the normal version. Must be a lot of code dedicated to looking for the CD to be present.

You got it. There are seven different 'segments', or pieces, to the normal RT3 executable. The copy protection goes into the fifth and sixth, named ".sbeui" (data segment, I think) and ".wqttuo" (code segment), that total about 1.8 MB; reason it's separate is that Gathering just purchased the code from another company and linked it in. Quite a bit of that code seems to be there just to obscure the actual copy protection; most of it doesn't make sense when disassembled, or adds thousands of references to random pieces of the game code just to mess up tools like IDA. Looks as if the crackers simply took out those two segments, moved up the final .rsrc segment (which contains the version stamp, which is why the 1.06 patches broke), and faked every functional call to the .wqttuo segment.

Kinda like having a locked door with the hinge pins on the outside.

[Hawk]

milo-I tried the A03 patch over the 1.05 with the no-cd hack and got this.



Do I need to revert back the the 1.05 exe to install the A03 then use the no-cd hack?

Edit 1: OK! I reverted back to the 1.05 and the install worked but if I use the no-cd hack won't that over-ride whatever the A03 patch does?

Edit 2: milo-are you using the same no-cd hack I have on my site?

[milo]

A03 didn't support no-cd. You need A04, which should be the current setup06.exe in the patch106 directory.

I think I have the same no-cd version - I got it from you! :)

[Hawk]

Ah! Thanks! I missed that.

[Hawk]

That did the trick. Even shows the Version info on the main screen. :D

[milo]

BTW... just as a warning to the NoCD users... do NOT use any of the buttons on the 'Links' page. Whoever cracked the program decided to redirect these to what looks like a malware site.

Not that any of the three sites still contains useful info... Any votes on what we should replace them with? I'm thinking Firaxis, Hawk's site, and Molse's SIM-Games forum.

[Wolverine@MSU]

Not that any of the three sites still contains useful info... Any votes on what we should replace them with? I'm thinking Firaxis, Hawk's site, and Molse's SIM-Games forum.

Sounds good to me. Anything but a malware site!

[Hawk]

Sounds good to me. Anything but a malware site!

Agreed!

Any votes on what we should replace them with? I'm thinking Firaxis, Hawk's site, and Molse's SIM-Games forum.

Works for me. :)

[Lama]

Why Firaxis? What have they done for us, lately?
Agreed on the other two.

[milo]

I figure we'd better include whoever's handling 'official' support for RT3. Then again, I can't find a single RT3 link on that site, so maybe it should be Take2 instead?

Not to mention that if someone has this thing installed, they aren't going to get official support anyway...

Okay. Out they go. Who's the replacement?

[Hawk]

There's a bunch of maps over at The Terminal that aren't on my site.
Of course the Coast to Coast Expansion and the 1.05 patch is at ExpressWorld.
Then there's RTI which I believe has a few maps I don't have.

[milo]

I was wrong about the links. Both version of the program are suffering from a minor bug when used with browsers other than Netscape or older Explorer, which may cause them to pop up multiple pages, all but one with random text in them. On my machine the random text happened to point to an evil page. Fixed in the beta, I think, though I'll want someone who uses Explorer to see how it behaves on his machine.

Decided to leave out changing the links, because it'd require sending out a new RT3.lng. Unless someone happens to have a copy of the German RT3.lng lying around, I can't really do that.