gHacks technology news » cracks http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:31:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Easy No-CD and No-DVD for games on Mac http://www.ghacks.net/2009/06/19/easy-no-cd-and-no-dvd-for-games-on-mac/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/06/19/easy-no-cd-and-no-dvd-for-games-on-mac/#comments Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:44:19 +0000 Joe http://www.ghacks.net/?p=13622 Computer users often hate having to have a CD or DVD in their drive to run a game. To circumvent this, images are often burned to hard drives or cracks used. Cracks are rapidly found for Windows, but it can be an extreme chore to find them for Macs.

EA use a product called Cider to power many of their Mac games. Cider basically adds a wrapper around the original PC game, and translates it on-the-fly to Mac. The recent release of ‘The Sims 3′, for example, works on OS X and Windows due to Cider.

Cider is likely to become more wide-spread. It saves game developers from having to develop ports, allows Mac and PC games to be released at the same time and ultimately little extra work must be put in to reach a larger market.

But Cider also allows certain Windows cracks to be implemented on Macs.

On OS X, Applications are actually just packages. If you have The Sims 3, for example, and go to the App and right click on ‘Show Package Contents’, and then choose ‘transgaming’, you will see a Windows folder structure. In there, all the files you’d expect to see are there. Basically, there’s a ‘The Sims 3.app>Contents>Resources>transgaming>c_drive>program files>Electronic Arts>The Sims 3′ folder.

The benefit of there being a hidden Windows folder structure in these apps are simple. If there’s a No-CD crack where you just have to replace a .exe, you find that .exe inside the Package and replace it. And then it works just like it does under Windows.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Related posts

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/06/19/easy-no-cd-and-no-dvd-for-games-on-mac/feed/ 4 Ubisoft Releases Reloaded Crack To Fix Their Game http://www.ghacks.net/2008/07/19/ubisoft-releases-reloaded-crack-to-fix-their-game/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/07/19/ubisoft-releases-reloaded-crack-to-fix-their-game/#comments Sat, 19 Jul 2008 11:50:23 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=5443 Let us talk about a major PR blunder for a short time. Ubisoft apparently temporarily (pulled by now again) released a fix for their game Rainbow Six Vegas 2 that fixed a problem for users who could not update and play the game in the latest version. Nothing problematic so far one would think but after analysing the fix with a hex editor it turned out that Ubisoft used a crack created by the warez group Reloaded to fix the problem.

It is obvious that game developers cannot give credit to warez groups even if their cracks are the perfect solution and that’s probably the reason why no credit was given.

It’s nevertheless highly hypocritical to ban forum members at the official Ubisoft forum for posting links to no-cd cracks while using one of those to fix a game.

I like no-cd cracks because they simplify the gaming experience. I do not have to pick and load a CD or DVD every time I want to play a game and it also saves me from hassles with copy protections.

You can read up on the story at Torrentfreak, Slashdot and the official Ubisoft forum. Props that they have not deleted the topic but only locked it.

Tags: , , , ,

Related posts

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/07/19/ubisoft-releases-reloaded-crack-to-fix-their-game/feed/ 3