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[witch]

Companies are generally more interested in the people doing the cracking in the first place and then the ones downloading the entire game, not just the exe.

They would also never try it in court, as they would lose, which would open them up to a whole lot of crap they don't want to deal with.

Sorry, I misunderstood, I thought you were saying they would lose if they took the original crackers to court, not the hapless endusers.

[neriana]

Companies are generally more interested in the people doing the cracking in the first place and then the ones downloading the entire game, not just the exe.

They would also never try it in court, as they would lose, which would open them up to a whole lot of crap they don't want to deal with.

Sorry, I misunderstood, I thought you were saying they would lose if they took the original crackers to court, not the hapless endusers.

Aah. That is an interesting question, actually -- while there's all sorts of stuff forbidding reverse-engineering, I don't think most judges would punish someone who only made a min-image or cracked an .exe. It's not something the big game companies are going to try out, either, at least not until they are more assured that they would win than they are now. There's a lot of gray area there.

[witch]

True, though those considerations didn't stop the music companies from pursuing ordinary people to ludicrous lengths. I think the overwhelming numbers of people doing illicit stuff with files is possibly a mitigating factor also.

Most people copy a thing or two, loan it to mates, etc etc - petty larceny really. There was one chap in a town nearby who actually advertised in the paper to sell CD/DVDs - he got done for about $150K. Another bloke trawled his illegally burned stuff round the Auckland markets for about four years before he was done, so I don't expect the police at my house in a dawn raid anytime soon!

[notveryawesome]

My now-husband used to work for a bookshop that specialised in (weird) underground books and videos. The owner of the shop used to buy legitimate copies of the films, make several illegitimate copies of each, and then rent them out to people. I honestly don't know how he got away with it.

[Ionopachys]

So just to be clear, I can't use the patch with the cracked exe?

[jsalemi]

So just to be clear, I can't use the patch with the cracked exe?

No, because the patch replaces it with a new one, and will barf if the existing .exe is different from the one that came with the game.

[witch]

I keep the original exe in the same folder, I just rename the file extension to 'old'. Then if I need the patch, I change the old filename to finish in .exe and the cracked file to end in something else and Bob's your uncle.

[Ionopachys]

I keep the original exe in the same folder, I just rename the file extension to 'old'. Then if I need the patch, I change the old filename to finish in .exe and the cracked file to end in something else and Bob's your uncle.

So you can restore the original exe, run the patch, then switch back to the cracked?

[witch]

Yep. Because you don't have to run the game, patch looks for .exe, finds .exe, does job, is happy.