Dark Forces CD-ROM Depenancy
Some Guy
the HD, so why must I still have the CD in the drive? I heard a rumor
that there is a patch to cure this annoying ailment. Anyone know anything
more about this?
Jerry B. Ray
Uh, I think that's the "copy protection" to prevent you from installing
the relatively small game (70 megs or so total) to hard disk on the
computer of everyone you know. If you do the full installation, it only
pings the CD once, at startup. Not such a terrible hassle, and better
than digging out a manual to type in a code every time...
JRjr
--
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Children growing up, old friends growing older
The innocence slips away...'--Rush, Time Stand Still
##### vap...@prism.gatech.EDU ######## Jerry B. Ray, Jr. ################
David Stucky
I think with a littile work you could install the whole game on your
hard drive and not have to mess with the CD-ROM. The big question is
do you have 70+ megs of free hard disk space. The "fully installs to
the HD" situation only puts the the sound and graphic 'drivers' and
the program control crap for a total of 8 megs. If you check out
the CD-ROM dirve LED you will learn that the only time the CD is
access in when you first load the game and when you are waiting for
the next level to load.
The rumor I heard was that some hackers had copies of DF on flopy,
22-24 1.44meg disks, all files zipped. This would still have to be
unzipped and put on your HD (70+ megs).
Why dose the game require the CD? More potential consumers have
CD-ROM drives than gig+ HD.
David Stucky...
Jerry B. Ray
>The "fully installs to
>the HD" situation only puts the the sound and graphic 'drivers' and
>the program control crap for a total of 8 megs.
Actually, if you do the "custom install" and check all the option boxes,
it installs 70.5+ megs to the HD. The Dark directory on the CD, plus
the relevant stuff in the root directory of the CD, is a total of about
70.7 megs.
>If you check out
>the CD-ROM dirve LED you will learn that the only time the CD is
>access in when you first load the game and when you are waiting for
>the next level to load.
I don't totally remember, but I believe with the full installation the
only time it goes to the CD is when you first run the game. I could be
wrong, though.
>Why dose the game require the CD? More potential consumers have
>CD-ROM drives than gig+ HD.
I also assumed that the size of the game, plus the need to access the
CD at startup, serve as a bit of copy protection. The CD access keeps
owners of the CD from installing the game on all his friends' machines,
and since not everybody has 70 megs of free space and 20-30 floppies,
cracking the CD access requirement and distributing the game on
disk probably isn't _that_ widespread, at least compared to the 5-disk
Tie Fighter and such.
Mr Danzig
how easy, we cracked this in a very few minutes (7) , we used a SUBST command
on the pc and substitued a drive that was a mapping of c:
c:\games\darkcd (subst directory)
c:\games\darkcd\dark (installation directory)
and made a batch file with the SUBST command which SUBST's then runs DF then deletes the SUBST drive.
We used z: for the subst (therefore LASTDRIVE=Z: is needed)
and edited the I.D. file that says your usual cd-drive and changed it to z:
and it works perfectly on 3 computers that have no CD-ROM
Matt
--
__ __ | Matt Farmer
/ `-' / ,, |
|[====|||||||||||[::} | s940...@yallara.cs.rmit.edu.au
\__.-._\ `` | s940...@arcadia.cs.rmit.edu.au
Maelstrom
The easiest way to get Dark Forces onto a hard drive (that has at least
72 megs free) is this:
1) Run the install program from the CD.
2) Do a custom install; select everything to be installed.
3) After it finishes, run setup and whatnot.
4) Copy CD.ID to the root C: directory.
5) Run Dark Forces from the hard drive (remove the CD first!).
6) It will give an error saying "The CD ain't there [sic]". Tell it that
the CD-ROM drive is drive C.
Voila!
Incidentally, to change anything in Setup, you have to "re-install" the
game. This is easy. Just select custom install, deselect everything,
and then run it. Just skip all the error messages; then you can
reconfigure it.
Note: This is all illegal. I'm not advocating it in the slightest bit.
:)
-----------------------------
Maelstrom: ma...@primenet.com
http://www.primenet.com:80/~mael1
"In order for a lie to exist, there must be a truth that it contradicts."
Bradley Samek
: The easiest way to get Dark Forces onto a hard drive (that has at least
: 72 megs free) is this:
: 1) Run the install program from the CD.
Here's a question for you. When I type install, I get a message
stating that the system is unable to open JEDI.CFG. I've tried this
with two different Dark Forces CDs and my system meets all of the criteria
required for the game.
Brad Samek
bsa...@uta.edu