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Age of empires 3 definitive edition mac5/30/2023 ![]() I do believe it’s technically illegal / against the EULA, but this a obviously a force majeure case. This is a rare example of a rather legitimate use case which is also fairly “white hat”, so that’s nice. Don’t worry if you’re struggling.Īnd another note: “cracking” is generally illegal and/or done for illegal purposes. I’ll mostly only show the successful path, so it might look kind of magic. I won’t go into too many details about how the interface looks, as the Hopper tutorial actually covers that nicely, but I’ll explain what I’m doing, and there’s presumably enough screenshots that you might just learn something.įirst, a note: this took me like 5 days to get right, and many unsuccessful attempts were made. It’s not free (it’s actually 90$), but you can freely use it for 30 minutes at a time with mostly all required functionality. ![]() The most famous one is IDA Pro, but it’s crazy expensive and I’m not sure it runs on a Mac, so I’ll go with Hopper. Our tool of choice for this step will be a disassembler: an application that takes the binary code of the executable and turns it into readable (haha) assembly code. It’s time for the actually interesting part of this article (yeah we’re over a thousand words in already, but are you not entertained?). Nowadays, I suppose we’d just call it hacking, but the word has stuck in the game piracy sphere (not that I’ve ever been anywhere near that, of course). So, with all else failing, we’ve only got one last thing to do: change the executable itself (aka “cracking” back in 2005). This seems to be as much as you can do from hacking the data. You might have hoped for “Medium”, but alas, no. Of course, in-game, you’re still stuck on the “Low” setting, so the logs aren’t lying. I’m not sure why this “generic dx7”is not the same as the one above. Intel 9 Series is the GMA 950 series, and it probably didn’t run Age 3 very well. Grepping for “8086” in Hex Fiend hits somewhere, and some of that text looks encouraging. You assume the game is detecting graphic cards, and you have Hexadecimal identifiers in the logs (in my case, 0x8086 - Intel, and 0x2773). (Imagine the same log screenshot as up top here) You replace all of that with dx9, which also shows up in that data occasionally, you save and you boot up the game. Hex Fiend actually has an option to parse bytes as UTF-16, so you grep for dx7. ![]() Perfectly sensible idea! (Not shown: this took me like a day to realise)Īnyways. After all, Windows loved UTF-16 (though it shouldn’t), and why not use that and ASCII shaders in the same file. “Obviously, that’s UTF-16”, you exclaim ! This is originally a Windows game, it makes perfect sense they’d store text in UTF-16, wasting basically half the space of the 30Mb data file. The first bytes spell out “ESPN”, which is probably the.
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