I know what your thinking, what has Magic Carpet to do with reversing for newbies, and why am I writing about CD protections and methods when all this might be considered as 'advanced' topics!.. Well, you might be surprised to hear that we are being conned left right and centre and to make things worse, it's all being done right under our noses!.

Yeah right, guess you know this already right?.  CD protection systems are, by and large, still in it's infancy, which means there's still plenty of time for us to embrace CD protection systems as they stand today and still be ready for when they mature.  Protectionists still have a few tricks up their sleeves so be ready for when they use them.

I have chosen this target as my first essay on CD Protection because it requires little knowledge on your part, which is good because you probably know little about this subject and will, I'm sure, work on many other data type disks with little modification.  Treat this essay as a 'basis' for your future reversing of these data disks.

Enough rambling, lets see what the deal is here.
 

About this protection system

Hidden Worlds is a CD Data Disk for the Game Magic Carpet, it is created by Bullfrog Productions, the same guys who created Theme Park, Syndicate, Populous and many other first rate software titles.

The 'key' principle behind game Data Disks is that In order to use them you need the Original Game before you can use them.  A clever marketing ploy..:)

Hmm, anyone that has ever bought a data disk for a CD game may have noticed that the Data Disk usually runs WITHOUT the original game ever being placed in the CD Drive!. Don't you find this a little odd?.
 

The Essay

Many Data Disks, but not all, are in fact, full version games in their own right, the fact that the box states you need the original game in order to play the data disk is usually a marketing ploy to get you to spend your money on buying their previous release of software just so that you can play their add-on games. Laugh you may at this folly, but I wonder how many people have fallen for this ploy.  OK, I will admit I was suckered in this way and did indeed hand over my money for this data disk and the original Magic Carpet CD game. Grrrr.

Data Disks also give the 'impression' that this is all they contain, just data, yet in reality they are much more than this.  In this example, the Hidden Worlds Data Disk is, in fact, a full game in it's own right, requiring NO files from the Original Magic Carpet game in order to get it to run.  So here we have a £15 game, that your told you need to spend a further £35 in order to play it!.

So what gives here..

When we try and run our datadisk without ever having run the original Magic Carpet game the data disk  reports: "You must first run the original Magic Carpet cd rom version"

Ah, a clue, it's telling us that all we need to do is run the original Magic Carpet CD in order to verify we have the original CD, so it's not checking if we have this disk, just that we have a file or files copied from it onto our hard disk.

So therefore our Hidden Worlds Data Disk must somehow be checking for one or more files from the original game in order to verify that we have purchased the original game. At this point we are not certain exactly what is being checked, it might be a hidden file somewhere in our c:\windows\system directory or maybe, one or more files from the original directory where the game was first installed onto our hard disk.

At this point it's a good idea to fire up Filemon.. For those who do not know what Filemon does, suffice to say it monitors all the calls to read/write to files and allows us to see what is going on while a program is running. In this particular case, we are interested to see what files are being checked before our data disk will run.

ok, firing up Filemon and attempting to run our Data Disk shows us just one call to read a file at: c:\carpet.cd\levels\levels.dat.  Of course there are many other calls such as windoze system calls to the c:\windows\win386.swp file but these can be ignored as they are win'95 specific file access and play no part in what the data disk is looking for.

Lets go on a hunch here.  The data disk is checking to see if there is a file called levels.dat inside a directory called c:\carpet.cd\levels\ and at this point we have absolutely no idea what's suppose to be inside this file or how big it's suppose to be.  Don't give up, maybe, just maybe the programmers looked for a quick way to verify if you had bought the original disk and didn't bother spending any time on checking what this file contains, other than a file named levels.dat exists on your hard disk!.

There's only one way to find out.

On your hard disk create the following directory:

md c:\Carpet.cd\levels

Next, we want to create a file called levels.dat and place this inside our c:\Carpet.cd\levels directory.

Lets go for it.

Create a txt file using NotePad and inside this file type something in, doesn't matter what you type as long as there's some text in it.

Now save this file as: levels.dat inside the c:\Carpet.cd\levels directory.

Now try and run our Hidden Worlds Data Disk....

Bingo!.  We now have a fully working Magic Carpet game and we didn't need to buy the original game to play it!.
 

Job Done.
 

The Crack

None supplied or required.
 

Final Notes

Bet you didn't think it was so easy to bypass this kind of checking, I'll bet the programmers thought this as well, why else would they have used it!.  If you are not prepared to at least look into this aspect of protections then how else are you going to find out.  You might be pleasantly surprised to find many other so called 'Data Disks' rely on this weak protection system so the next time you get the chance to buy a Data Disk but don't have the original game then think twice before dismissing it.

I know for certain that using Regmon will also make a Data Disk of Age of Empires - Rise of Rome run without it's original game disk. Thanks SiG..:)

While I haven't spent much time examining Westwood's Red Alert Data Disks, I know for certain that in order to use their data disks you need some of the original files from the game itself. The Red Alert data disks cannot be fooled into using just any named file because they get patched to the latest version of the game. The obvious answer here is use Filemon & Regmon to see what files the data disks expect to find on your hard disk and then get a friend with Red Alert to send you these files. In theory, you would be able to use any Red Alert Data disks thereafter.

Before anyone from Westwood complains, I would like to point out that I'm against the principle of having to buy the original game before I can play a Data Disk, since we both know Data Disks can just as easily be made into 'full' working games in their own right. I own the originals for the complete range of Command & Conquer + data disks as well as Red Alert & Data Disks as well as Dune 2000 and many of your other software range so I'm not against buying your software, it's the silly marketing ploy you use regarding 'Data Disks' that I'm against.

For the curious...

The Magic Carpet Data Disk cost me £15 to buy,  it came on a CD capable of storing 650MB of data, which, if we took off the cost of the box & small manual, means that my £15 is equal to 2.3 pence per megabyte on the CD itself.

However, the actual data disk only contains 119MB of data, therefore each megabyte of data on this CD costs me around 12.6 pence per megabyte. Doesn't sound much but keep reading..

Out of this 119MB of available data the 'introduction' & smaller movies take up a whopping 106MB, leaving just 12MB of actual 'game' data to play with. Therefore, the 'movies' cost ME  £13.23, making the actual game code just £1.77.

From this £1.77 if we take away the cost of the fancy box containing 90% air, the small 4 page manual, a cd case and cd itself then we are left with about £1.52 for the game code itself.

If we take away the fancy movies we can then zip up out game code onto around 6 floppy disks, now our add-on data disk is hardly worth putting onto a cd at all!.

If we now look at the actual costs involved to us, then we see that we must also purchase the orginal game in order to play our data disk, which means our data disk, in order for us to use it will now cost us £15 + the price of the original game, which is £33 making a ground total of £47.

Not bad considering our data disk code is worth £1.52.....
 

Ob Duh

Do I really have to remind you all that by buying and NOT stealing the software you use will ensure that these software houses will be encouraged to producing even *better* software for us to use and enjoy.

Ripping off software through serials and cracks is for lamers..

If your looking for cracks or serial numbers from these pages then your wasting your time, try searching elsewhere on the Web under Warze, Cracks etc.