[Sandwich]

Yeah, whatever. No-CD cracks are perfectly legal; I don't want to wear down my DVD burner running incessant in-game music from the latest games when I can make an image of the disc on my spacious HDD. It also saves fumbling and sqapping out discs every time I want to switch games.

ANYway... my beef is this. Most no-cd cracks are of version 1.0 of a game. But once a developer releases a bugfix, update, or other patch, I'm left with a choice: version 1.1 w/ CD/DVD loudly spining away, or version 1.0 running off HDD, bugs and all.

Does anyone know of some sort of post-retail version no-cd crack repository?

[Zuljin]

Well it usually depends on how new the game is but..
For the most part www.gamecopyworld.com and http://www.megagames.com/ works for me, it's the first place I'll check if I need a no-cd crack atleast for any reason.

[Mefustae]

Indeed, and up-to-date cracks usually come out after a short period. Of course, that's not always the case. About one week after the Diablo2: Lord of Destruction v1.10 crack was first posted on Megagames, a patch for v1.11 came out...*sigh*

[aldo_14]

Och.  I was hoping for the other c word.


What?!

[Goober5000]

Originally posted by Sandwich
Yeah, whatever. No-CD cracks are perfectly legal; I don't want to wear down my DVD burner running incessant in-game music from the latest games when I can make an image of the disc on my spacious HDD.

So what's the problem with that?  I copied the FS2 ISOs to my hard drive and ran them using Daemon Tools, and they worked just fine.  Of course it's still running a virtual CD, but the computer doesn't know the difference.

[aldo_14]

I think some games now override that sort of thing so you can't just mount a virtual CD.  Because otherwise it'd be the obvious way to circumvent copy protection.

[Zuljin]

Originally posted by Goober5000
So what's the problem with that?  I copied the FS2 ISOs to my hard drive and ran them using Daemon Tools, and they worked just fine.  Of course it's still running a virtual CD, but the computer doesn't know the difference.

You can't do that with most of any newer games, as you most likely won't even get it ripped to your harddrive unless you manage to bypass the copy protection.

If you do get past that bit then you most likely need a backup cd crack, to bypass the cd-check or other sort of nasties.
If the game doesn't check for a cd however, then there shouldn't be any problem with that.

[Fury]

Originally posted by Goober5000
So what's the problem with that?  I copied the FS2 ISOs to my hard drive and ran them using Daemon Tools, and they worked just fine.  Of course it's still running a virtual CD, but the computer doesn't know the difference.

Copy protection technologies can spot out the difference between authentic CD/DVD and a mounted CD-/DVD-image. Which is why you most likely will need no-cd cracks if you want to use CD/DVD-images. A shame really, the suits does not get that copy protections won't stop piracy, only makes life more difficult for those who own a legal copy.

[SadisticSid]

I thought cracks were (thought to be) illegal because they're decompiled or otherwise reverse-engineered versions of the executable and thus break the 'agreements' you endure when you open the software?

Zuljin, virtually every copy protection scheme has been defeated, and there's little anyone can do to stop it from happening. Instead of cracks you're also likely to find the copy protected sectors on virtual CD images which are about 500K and remove the need for the original discs. You only need Daemon Tools, which is pretty much undetectable, to spoof a 'valid' drive and image.

[Zuljin]

Originally posted by SadisticSid
I thought cracks were (thought to be) illegal because they're decompiled or otherwise reverse-engineered versions of the executable and thus break the 'agreements' you endure when you open the software?

Zuljin, virtually every copy protection scheme has been defeated, and there's little anyone can do to stop it from happening. Instead of cracks you're also likely to find the copy protected sectors on virtual CD images which are about 500K and remove the need for the original discs. You only need Daemon Tools, which is pretty much undetectable, to spoof a 'valid' drive and image.

Cracks are sort of a gray area really..

Yes I know.
I wasn't saying they hadn't been, as soon as anything new in that area comes out it doesn't take long before they are bypassed.
I was more referring to the average user who is just trying to rip the ISO to the harddrive.
Doing that will most likely give you write errors or such because of the copy protection (not all games do this ofcourse, but many do).
If you can get it to disk however, all you need to do is mount it in Daemon Tools and get the crack that bypasses the cd-check, or in some rare cases, you can just mount and play.

[Sandwich]

Why the hell is the Star Wars Battlefront 1.2 patch a flipping 169Mb????

[CP5670]

GameCopyWorld and Megagames have almost everything, and Astalavista gets the rest for me. As for the patches, just wait for about a week and they will generally show up with fairly popular games. These crackers are very fast with their updates.

And I haven't used CDs for playing games for quite a while. I think every game I have is cracked except those that don't need the CD anyway. It generally prevents you from playing online, but the only multiplayer game I play these days is UT2004, which like the other Unreal games doesn't have any CD protection (big kudos to Epic for that ).