| Age of Empires - Rise of Rome Data Disk |
| Program Name: | Age of Empires - Rise of Rome |
| Program Author: | Microsoft |
| Essay Author: | SiG |
Introduction:
I recently read The Sandman's latest essay (72) and found it very interesting indeed. I straight away went searching through all my cds looking for my Age of Empires - Rise of Rome cd which I'd bought not that long ago.On running the cd I found that it required you to have the original Age of Empires cd so I simply discarded it. Yet after reading The Sandman's essay on Magic Carpet I immediately started work on it and found it very similar yet I believe just a little bit more difficult than the Magic Carpet Crack. You will find that if you try to install Rise of Rome without having Age of Empires already present on your hard drive you will get a message telling you that AOE cannot be found. During this essay you will be shown that the Rise of Rome addon is infact a full game by itself and does not actually require you to have already purchased AOE, it's just a ploy by Microsoft to get you to by the original. It would be a good idea to have read The Sandman's essay (72) on cd protections similar to this so that you have a bit of a clearer background of the topic at hand.
The Essay:
Unlike with Magic Carpet running Filemon straight
off won't reveal anything interesting that we can use but it will come
in handy later. Instead load up the Rise of Rome installation exe, now
open Regmon, click on install in the Rise of Rome exe. Switch back to Regmon
and save the text to a file. Close Regmon and open the file you just saved
to, for viewing. There are a lot of queries to keys that really mean nothing
to us so instead search for 'age' and it should be found at a location
that looks something similar to this:
| 1388 Ebuf250 OpenKey HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Games\Age of Empires\1.00 |
| NOTFOUND |
We can see here that the Rise of Rome exe has looked for a registry key HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Games\Age of Empires\1.00 which would have been created by AOE but doesn't exist on our systems so let's make it happen. Inside HK_LOCAL_MACHINE open the key 'Microsoft' then make a new key called 'Games', inside that make a key called 'Age of Empires' and finally inside that a key called '1.00'. When finished open up Regmon once again as well as the Rise of Rome installer and do as you did before, save the text from Regmon and open for viewing. You will notice that things have changed.
| 1389 Ebu83b2 OpenKey HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Games\Age of Empires\1.00 |
| SUCCESS hKey: 0xC49AB810 |
| 1390 Ebu83b2 QueryValueEx HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Games\Age of Empires\1.00\Launched |
| NOTFOUND |
From this we can derive that the Rise of Rome exe has been satisfied
with our entered registry keys, it was a success therefore it has moved
onto looking for a string contained in this key called 'Launched, well
no points for anyone who guesses what we have to do. Create a string in
the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Games\Age of Empires\1.00 key called 'Launched',
right click on it and choose modify, type in anything just as long as the
string isn't empty. Repeat the process of running Regmon on Rise of Rome
and open the text for viewing. It should look similar to this:
| 1389 Ebu83b2 OpenKey HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Games\Age of Empires\1.00 |
| SUCCESS hKey: 0xC49AB810 |
| 1390 Ebu83b2 QueryValueEx HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Games\Age of Empires\1.00\Launched |
| SUCCESS 36 35 36 35 65 62 68 6A ... |
| 1391 Ebu1044 CloseKey HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Games\Age of Empires\1.00 |
| SUCCESS |
| 1392 Ebu1044 OpenKey HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Games\Age of Empires\1.00 |
| SUCCESS hKey: 0xC49AB810 |
| 1393 Ebu1044 QueryValueEx HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Games\Age of Empires\1.00\InstallationDirectory |
| NOTFOUND |
| 1394 Ebu1044 CloseKey HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Games\Age of Empires\1.00 |
| SUCCESS |
Hmmm, well now it's looking for a string called 'InstallationDirectory', strange. Ohh well go ahead create the string yet when you go to modify it don't just type in anything. Remember back to that error message, it said something about AOE might have been moved, what this string tells Rise of Rome is where to find AOE so let's modify it so it reads c:\aoe, it could be any folder it doesn't matter, make that folder on your hard drive. Now my bet is that now Rise of Rome thinks it knows where AOE is it's going to look for a file in that directory so load up Filemon and run Rise of Rome, click 'install' and read the saved text. You will notice a new line that has appeared:
100 12:59:48 PM Ebub231 Attributes C:\AOE\EMPIRES.EXE NOTFOUND
Let's make a file in your c:\aoe directory which is names 'Empires.exe', edit it so that it contains any text just as long as it's not empty. Run the Rise of Rome installer and ohh my goodness you are allowed to install the game without even having Age of Empires already installed. How cool is that?
Conclusion:
I hope that my blabbering on has taught you something
that will help you or at least shown you like The Sandman did in his essay
that cd protections are sometimes just overbloated schemes to get you to
spend money. Please send all questions to sigmental@yahoo.com