Fravia's TOOLS OF OUR TRADE Messageboard ~ Moderated Re: Anti-SoftIce games: Fetching serial for Settlers 3!
Friday, 08-Jan-99 05:41:17

I have been working on this prg some time.
S3 uses createfilea to check for SIW, If you put BPX on createfilea and use "watch *(esp+(1*))" you get the address of the stack where the file name for SI is located, after some breaks it will say SICE change that to something else and the prg continues, there is another check later on that also stops the program. And you are in the titel screen.
The program chedks again later and this time nothing apparently happens ;-). But playing the game some of the units will do stange things. MetalMelter vil produce sulphur og Meat, WoodCutter won┤t cut newly grown wood and so on.
You won┤t be able to patch the program it is packed/encrypted with PEPACK.
I have an uncompressed S3.exe but I still haven┤t found the protection scheme. I have made an S3.exe that redirect all calls to Createfilea and changes the the stack so SICE can┤t be found.
BTW you will probably find it difficult to find where to BPX when you have type the wrong Serial. You can search the memory for the value but S3 uses a new location every time for the value som maybe a BPR is the way out...
If you are interested in exploring this target, email me and we can work together.
MAK

Mak