The Free Version Of StarCraft Is NOT What It Seems...
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 ก.พ. 2025
- Let's take a deep dive into the original 1998 release of StarCraft as well as the free 2017 version to see how similar they really are.
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Not the best video title. I watch you because I like your content but if I saw this without knowing your channel I wouldn't click it.
Thanks for the input - TH-cam titles are hard, I may swap several in and out depending on the performance. I'd be curious to know why you didn't like this specific title?
Its interesting, but I'm curious as a layman, what is the purpose? Are they trying to prevent reverse engineering? Are they trying to stop pirating? Or are they trying to prevent people from playing without having B.net?
I suspect they’re trying to stop people cheating
this new crew at blizzard your giving them more credit than they deserve, the more you dig into the new code the more youll understand why i say such.
These reverse engineering videos on older games are fascinating.
Glad you're enjoying them (:
Also my favorite content on this channel!
We'd of had it gold if the source code disk for starcraft 1 was leaked instead of returned.
@@nathanbaggsYeah really enjoy these. Makes me reminisce and cry looking at a bunch of newer software with multiple nested VMs. Argh.
"Why is my VM talking to me!?"
Oh man. Years ago now, I started a windows 10 install, got interrupted, closed it and stuffed it into my backpack. I figured it'd go into sleep mode, so I sure was shocked about 10 minutes later when my backpack started yelling at me as I was walking down the street.
I get that it's probably good for accessibility, but an installer speaking unprompted sure is jarring.
Computers should only speak when spoken to
@@nathanbaggs Not even then in my opinion.
This happened to me in the middle of a meeting.
Sadly, I found that "Oh no, the voices are back!" was not the humorous interlude I thought it would be...
I have vivid memories of guessing the key as a kid. I was joking with a friend saying "don't worry, we'll just try all combinations". Starting with all zeroes and incrementing only the last digit by 1 each time. Turns out, this worked with the final digit being "3". What was more interesting, is that after discovering this, we found this trick (and variations of) worked on many different games.
A few people have shared stories like this, which is fascinating. Thanks!
I have a similar memory that I had all but forgotten. Went to stay with my grandparents and brought the CD with me to install there but didn't have the key. Was frustrated and upset so I just spammed letters and numbers and got it on a few tries... Thought it was a miracle at the time 😂
That's probably the only practical usefulness of it, that it informed you: hey, your laptop woke up from sleep in your backpack and it's overheating - roasting itself in there. There was (not sure if it still is) a bug with Sleep function in Windows and laptops kept "waking up" and overheated like in an oven in neat-closed backpacks.
i only ever "guessed" the key for quake 3 arena. just hold g and it worked.
Are you the hacker 4chan?
VM: What is my purpose?
Nathan: You run an old game in which I will only be looking for the rendering code.
VM: Oh my God.
I would feel some sort of mechanical sympathy for my VM, if VirtualBox didn't keep crashing (:
if VMs are butter bot does that make containers meseeks?
@@nathanbaggs Virtual Box is not a proper emulator, but a virtualization thingie. You need something like pcem.
As long as the butter is passed all is well.
THAT CD KEY THING EXPLAINS SO MUCH. I swore I once “guessed” a CD-Key as a kid.
It turns out I might just have gotten lucky with the last number?
Nice to know it is possible to just spam numbers and possibly have it work! Lolol
I was really hoping someone would comment saying they tried this all those years a go (looks like you're not the only one!) (:
Yeah the technique they're using is called a checksum. It's not meant for security, it's meant to be used as error detection when transmitting/receiving data. If the data changed but the checksum didn't, there's an error somewhere in the message.
This can be used for things like checking if the contents of a file have been tampered with by including a checksum of the file's contents in the file, assuming the user wasn't smart enough to fix the checksum while they were tampering with the data.
If the program knows a file isn't supposed to change no matter what, they can keep a hard-coded copy of the checksum and detect if you changed the file even if you fixed the file's internal checksum. Of course, a smart user can just find the code that checks this and bypass it or edit the program's copy of the checksum to match the hacked file too...
Worked the same with credit card numbers ;)
@@alexxx4434 Credit cards just follow the Luhn Algorithm with the added check that the first digit identifies which type of card it is.
111-1111-1112
the fun thing is that if you look closely, the "old graphics" on the remastered version actually don't look the same as the original, in part maybe because the new one was made to support zooming in and out, as well as widescreen vs. 4:3 ratios, so likely isn't considering the canvas it draws to as a fixed number of pixels
At first the classic graphics looked absolutely horrible when Blizzard released the remastered version with REALLY ugly upscaling. They improved it a bit since then, but it still doesn't look as good as SC BW 1.16.1 or before with a good ddraw.dll replacement.
@@theshinken How to replace ddraw.dl?
Man that starcraft opening sound, classic. Also mounting cd images, haven't done that for years
It was a simpler time
@@nathanbaggs Not sure sure, today everything is Plug n' Play. Back in the day I recall spending hours slightly adjusting memory allocation in dos to get games to run in a stable manner, after all we only had 16 mb (and we had a lot for that time). I ended up memorizing what settings I needed for every game I wanted to play. Today you just hit the game icon on your phone and if it doesn't work you uninstall and try the next one.
Daemon tools, or Alcohol 120% , remember those tools? ❤
@@nathanbaggs Ironically, mounting CD images is far simpler now than it was in the simpler old days. Windows 10 can mount certain types of image files without 3rd party software.
@@beidero DOS was kind of annoying like that. There's that Bill Gates quote floating around about 640kb being enough for everybody that gets quoted out of context. He wasn't saying that that is all you'd ever need, he was talking about how to divide that first 1mb of RAM as the computers a the time could address fewer bits at once than later machines. That sort of nonsense didn't pop up again until hardware manufacturers could make more RAM than a 32bit processor could address at once.
I remember spending so much time trying to figure out how to get enough stuff loaded into high memory that the low memory would be enough to run my favorite games. Later on DOS4GW was developed that made it a lot easier.
Everything is open source if you can read asm.
I really like these deep technical dives on code like this.
Thanks! They take a long time to make but I've been pretty overwhelmed by the positive response
*source available
it's a lost art nowadatys
Everything is fine and dandy as long as you never make me write in Assembly again.
Storm was not an engine but a sort of abstraction mechanism for OS-specific stuff: reading files (including files from inside compressed MPQs), memory management, dispatching window messages, manipulating textual strings, etc. You can find various lists on the Internet that match function ordinals to their 'real' names. It was also used by other Blizzard games like Diablo and WarCraft, albeit with some modifications between games (Storm.dll from one game would not be a drop-in replacement for the other game).
The first modder-made MPQ extractors took advantage of storm to do the extractin'. Anyway, just wanted to also point out it's called "Storm" cause "Blizzard". lol. It might seem obvious for most people but it took me literally years to figure that one out. Got helped by "Heroes of the Storm" getting named like that.
thank god you censored the key, now i have no idea what it might've been
Got to be careful with information like that
😂
Very interesting comparison. I also hate when launchers require you to run the game from within them instead of direct from the exe file - which is why I quite like GOG - it allows that.
I get why they do it but I don’t want a different launcher for every game I play
@@nathanbaggsI just make a shortcut of the gog .exes and launch them from steam.
@@maryrose2676I think steam is a terrible launcher for a couple reasons. But then again it doesn't have much competition.
Personally I like playnite over every launcher out. I have all my GOG, console, and steam games on it.
@@bluetooth2677 I play with a lot of mods, Steam's native mod support is what drew me in. But I agree. For games without mod support, I don't use steam. Personally, the best game launcher I have is my games folder. Playnite seems interesting. Looking at it now. Thanks for mentioning it.
@@bluetooth2677why do you think it is terrible? I'm sincerely curious
2:39 I like how you censored the actual key part of the CD-key, it's hilarious :P
I'd guess you can't legally protect a single digit key, but you never know!
the utter misery of everyone and their dog requiring a game launcher.... i was pretty loathe to hop on the steam bandwagon and that is actually providing some value to the end user. hell no dawg i'm not going to have 3 or 4 game launchers so you can "synergise your brand". just like i'm not subscribing to 5 streaming services to watch 1 show on each service.
Yes I agree it's the same with steaming services - everyone wants their slice of the pie
It's the enshittification. Everything must be a cable-TV subscription instead of a Box product.
agreed,tho as legally i cant get StarCraft any other way it is what it is,i also hate how they promote their other games into my face when i only litteraly care about StarCraft,someone told me StarCraft characters appear in heroes of the storm,but all i got was some random world of warcraft character so 1 minute after installing it i deleted it,so if i could play StarCraft without a launcher it would sure feel refreshing but i guess you gotta do what you gotta do
@@theicyphoenix_7745
I dont know how come you installed a whole ass game just to open it for a minute then uninstall it, when the tutorial is literally James Raynor from Starcraft 1 & 2.
Welp you support monopolies then, other launchers are competition to steam, i get it you want maximum convinience but i take one extra click over giving valve control over the entire market, they already hold an absurd 72% market share globaly, meaning they are close to the point where At&t were hit with anti monopoly regulation by the us government.
But iguess gaben good trumps any other argument.
These videos are still really interesting even when you only understand 10% of the content
Nice view!
I do have to point out that you're comparing version 1.04 (I think, this was the first BroodWar version) to version 1.16 or something like that (too lazy to check the exact version)
So what they provided might actually by the original one with the latest patch before the remaster. I do remember they had to patch it at one point for the colors to work ok on Windows 7 and later for example. And they also fixed A LOT of exploits that were still working in version 1.04. And multiplayer improvements. So, can't say I'm that surprised they're very different. They probably have something anti-cheating too.
Thanks for the insight, I'll admit to not going too deep on version comparison. It was whatever version i could find for both 1998 and 2017
@@nathanbaggs Yeah, it's still interesting, nevertheless.
The updated version he got from BattleNet would be the same version number as the latest Remastered patch, so 1.23.10 or whatever, because the modern free version is just Remastered with the new graphics and some other features disabled. This can be pretty obvious from the fact that the free version has a massively bloated file size compared to older versions, because it still includes all the Remastered files.
I believe that a lot of the differences between it and the last legacy version, 1.16.1 from 2009, actually go back to the 1.17 and 1.18 patches that were released in 2017 during the run-up to Remastered’s release. Most mods ever made for the game need 1.16.1 or an earlier version, even many newer ones made after the new patches, because the new patches broke a bunch of things and were more difficult to mod than the earlier versions.
Ghidra naming all the functions "FUN" does indeed make it more enjoyable.
Made me smile the first time I loaded it up for sure 😂
11:15 - Actually all the people with decades of experience left blizzard.
Back when this game was made..decades ago lol
and were replaced by "devs" like piratesoftware. Devs in quotations because many of his coworker have said he didn't do anything there.
I recently discovered your channel and it is fantastic. I've never done much assembly programming/debugging so it's super helpful and cool to see how you tackle all these problems. Awesome stuff!
Always love old implementations of license keys!
I get the feeling it's something they felt they needed to include but didn't put a lot of effort into
What if they explicitly made low effort in that place in a move against capitalization?
At the time when sc came out most developers knew that their games would be cracked and warezed before it hit the shelves anyway, so most implementations had the same spirit as how locks only keep honest thieves out.
@@rnts08 They also knew that most people who had internet connections were connecting via dialup and may or may not have the ability to connect to their servers in order to authenticate. Even later on when cbroadband became more common, people pitched an absolute fit when always on connections were required to play games that they'd bought. And with good reason, pirated copies didn't require that.
Great Stuff! New series idea: disassembling all the software that tells you it cannot run on older Windows if it is really true or just a marketing tactic. Keep it up :)
That CD-key trick sure would have blown my 12yo mind.
Imagine the 'playground cred' this would have gotten me! Infinite Starcraft keys!
A few people have shared stories about guessing a valid key, at least now we know why (:
i remember putting a random number for the serial in 1999 and it worked, finally now i know why
I was really hoping someone would comment saying they tried this all those years a go (:
@@nathanbaggs pretty sure it worked just to enter the game (single-player), to acces the battle-net we used BNGatewayEditor to edit the server list and add our private servers though
@@nathanbaggs I also remember putting 3's or 1's and it worked perfectly every time :)
Me who have never seen this channel before and got this video show up in "suggested" section, thinking this video would be about changes made about some campaign missions or units stats or something more in terms of gameplay: "INTERESTING".
Also me who have watched whole video while I have never had any experience with any coding: "I like your funny words magic man".
0:14 those transitions are giving me chills
The anti-debugger and obfuscation methods are truly sad given the trend in the industry to screw over consumers. Blizzard is actually among the worst when it comes to honoring purchases, having yanked at least two games so far.
They have to do something to prevent cheaters though right?
@@nathanbaggs true but then what happens when they become the cheaters? :)
Nathan's correct, any form of digital media deserves some form of 'anti-piracy', you wouldn't like it if your product you worked hard on could be stolen with a simple 'copy and paste'. 20 years ago you wouldn't have applied todays trends and tropes to what at the time was genuine anti-piracy.
I think you're also forgetting that a lot of these classic developers/publishers were smaller (relatively) teams with passion for their work, they're now massive corporations who only answer to shareholders.
Again, if I asked you 20 years ago what you thought of Blizzard, you would've told me Starcraft was great and that they absolutely smashed it out the park with Warcraft III. You're retroactively judging a company for something they wouldn't do for 15~20 years.
Let's all stop pretending that Blizzard (or Ubisoft or GameFreak or Raven and so on) are the same people/company they were 10/20/30 years ago, unfortunately we have lived long enough to see them become bereft of passion and or be blinded by money, only to be pumping out the same old formulaic crap.
No hate, I just think there's an important perspective you're ignoring. Hopefully this makes sense.
French player here. They completely changed the French translation with the Remaster. Now, the translation is more literal and less evocative, and sometimes completely nonsensical. It also messed up keyboard shortcuts.
That’s a shame, did you go back to the original?
@@nathanbaggs No, I don't know how to do it, if it's even possible.
Salut, je déteste aussi la nouvelle traduction.
J'ai réinstallé le jeu d'origine en montant une image des DCs et mis les clefs de mes boîtiers originaux.
The blur at 2:40 got me
I believe I’ve seen client sdk run while playing either D4 or WoW, so you’re right about that running on the modern games, very interesting to see these videos 😁
I don't think people will complain if you make longer videos. Really interesting stuff.
On the references to choosing between an OpenGL or DX renderer on the free version- there used to be a digital download version of the game client before the “free version”, which is based on the Remastered client AFAIK, which you could get by either registering your old CD key on your blizzard account or buying digitally. It was basically the client rewritten for then modern OS’s like Mac OS X (which of course would’ve used OpenGL, originally the older version for Classic Mac OS I imagine QuickDraw) or Win2k/XP and later.
Thinking that’s something leftover from that version of the client of course. There also was a more lightweight launcher with just a really basic flat UI with tabs that you could choose options like whether to start the game in windowed mode or not (I seem to recall this originally being a Mac OS exclusive for some of the earlier updated versions of the client). Seemed to me that the digital releases of Diablo II and WC3 from the late 2000s to early 2010s also used the same client. Which might explain the deferred rendering references in the OpenGL version you ran.
Starcraft is a balls to the walls test of wits. Not for the feint of heart. It was lucky hit accident made by an unlikely group of nerds who loved RTS.
That era is long gone and will never be back. Now it only resides as a memory and for the real nerds. Maven's Haven and Katan's Lair were kickass on kali.
glDrawElementsBaseVertex was introduced in OpenGL 3.2 released in 2009, so definitely an updated drawing pipeline.
Would be very interested to see the API trace of the original running in OpenGL mode
It didn’t occur to me till after filming that there’s probably an OpenGL renderer for the original as it was also release on mac
Fascinating stuff. I'm trying to get into reverse engineering somewhat myself as I'm on the team of a low level PC emulator and we sometimes need to reverse engineer drivers or software to perfect implementations of poorly documented hardware, and I want to learn so I can help the part of the team that does this. This gives me a lot of ideas of how to understand and work through the output of something like ghidra, so thank you
I LOVE these videos, I wish they were 40 mins plus
I thought this would be about how the in game experience is different. As in if the campaign or some graphics or something is different.
Well yes. I noticed that right away since the in-game fonts didn't render how they rendered in the 1.16.x version of the game
Amazing content! It's so impressive how you can scan obfuscated code like this
Absolutely great vids. Love this combination of learning, nostalgia and a hint of sarcasm 😂
if I remember correctly from the lan parties as a kid, we always used 1 followed by just 0 to get it working on all pcs
Back in the day, I always used 2222-22222-2223 or 3333-33333-3332 cd-key (can't remember which one worked) - but it didn't allow BNET access.
This is absolutely fascinating mate, thank you for sharing. I grew up playing starcraft, online one of my favorite maps was probavly "PTWTC" and tarpit D lol, also Evolves and cat and mouse
Great video. How did you get dark mode in Ghidra?
I didn't understand much but I like the video
For the original Starcraft IIRC you can bypass the key by simply adding a bunch of 0s or clicking OK a bunch of times, I forget. It just stops you from playing online if you do that (LAN works fine, key is checked upon attempting BNet connection).
Edit: Ah I see you quickly figured out just how basic the key check is. Lovely memory!
Was the "No key was supplied with the rip" a joke? It's right there in the video at 00:52
man that start up sound of the installer nostalgia
Would be interesting to learn how their anti-debugging techniques work, exactly.
2:06 "Excuse me a moment while I just crack this game, now that tiny little roadblock is out of the way I'll continue with what I was doing"
Interestingly about the CD KEY, its either Starcraft or Diablo 1 (possibly both), the key 1234567890 (and repeat till it fills the text fields) works. I remember trying it for giggles when I was a wee lad, and it worked.
Lel
It was quite interesting to watch about it!
Thanks for the video!
Using a timestamp comparison as an anti-debugging method is such as a troll move. Simple, but effective, unless you bypass it, which however may take a long time depending how often this check is used in the entire codebase.
You can run the old version with DX11 or Open GL with WineD3D For Windows.
Super helpful for old games using parts of direct draw/3d that are no longer supported.
Hi, do you think you could RE a game called Space Empires IV, there are a couple of quirks I would love to fix/change on a modern system, happy to elaborate further if interested. I think the game was written in Delphi.
Also, what limits are there to Ghidra, can you do a tutorial video at some point though no rush? Great video otherwise, loved SC1.
A lot of people don’t know this but Starcraft was somewhat popular in the before times when software came on physical media.
Money can be exchanged for goods and services.
The law of large numbers dictates that at least one thrift shop near you has a copy mixed in with the audio CDs for sale for $1 or less.
An assembly tutorial for Apple Silicon would be really interesting, in your unique style
I wish I was able to do all the stuff you did in the beginning to install the original!
I wish I had focused my career differently, I'd love to be able to do stuff like this.
Oh well.
0:05 It’s a cultural phenomenon. Phenomena is plural. “It’s a cultural phenomena.” makes as much sense as “Look at that trees.”. Just proving we’re paying attention!
The coolest thing was you showing how non-robust that CD key system was.
Having starcraft on my list of games to play in the future , since I kinda have no clue what or where to download a free full version with full content I thought you were going to show some stuff removed from free version well good to know thats not the case.
I think the changes make sense. DirectDraw is pretty much obsolete at this point, plus it had compatibility problems with modern Windows version, especially on Vista and 7. So redoing the rendering in something more modern, that also leverages the power of modern GPUs makes sense. Plus it enables some of the new graphical effects in the rematster. I guess it was already developed for the remaster and backported, or the "new" version is just remaster without the new graphics. After all, you can switch between them on the fly. I don't know why D3D9 instead of 10 or 11, maybe because it has less overhead? OGL maybe for the OSX Version, but on the other hand OpenGL support is legendary broken on Mac devices for years.
And because you can also play in the online ladder, those obfuscation techniques also makes sense. Not everbody looks into the executables to learn about it like you, but to find weaknesses to cheat.
I think diablo also uses storm
Ah interesting, thanks!
@@nathanbaggsDiablo, D2, StarCraft, Warcraft 2 and 3 all use storm.dll. its primary use is reading the MPQ files used to store game data for these games, though the DLL also contains functions relating to networking, memory management, and such.
@@Bobbias WoW also used Storm until Wrath of the Lich King when they changed the rendering engine to allow for higher quality rendering on in-game cutscenes when you don't have control of the camera.
@@sintanan469 ahh, I somehow completely blanked on that one.
@@Bobbias It's actually pretty funny in the WoW case. The terrain generation is the War3 map render just expanded on with larger maps. Terrain features and pathing maps are added to original 2004 vanilla WoW just like map makers did for War3 and TFT custom maps. In theory if War3 could handle WoW map sizes you could just port the terrain over 1-to-1 because the maps are encoded the same way War3 encodes maps, too.
Turns out when you give fans the keys to the kingdom with reverse engineering Storm.dll and .mpq files for six years, people knew how to edit WoW day 1.
" -launch -uid s 1 " man, you are god :D
LOL - Years spent programming and I might as well be listening to him speak Chinese for how well I am able to follow this video. Interesting stuff, obviously nothing I could even attempt.
Yeah, I was trying to play Starcraft in Windows 9x and figured, I might as well play the original version. Was pretty bummed to find that the "original version" was not the remaster, except with locked to the original graphics mode... and to make that even more annoying, you are still made to download all of the HD graphics.
So they did the same as they did to Warcraft III, made a remaster that replaced the original and removed some of the nice features the original game had. Like supporting older OS and taking up a LOT less space.
At least with Diablo 2 they did not replace the original game. I guess they noticed that fans got displeased having the game they had already paid for practically removed. Diablo 1, Warcraft II and Diablo 2 should all still be able to run, even using their original Battle Net and such.
I wouldn't be NOP spamming through that sub routine 10:15 I would be starting with 0043fc and changing JNS to JNZ Short LAB_1000440f JNZ Short (for short jumps) and Long (for long jumps) to reference assembly lines will simplify your experience. Just my two cents.
The conclusion seems rather vague for the basic viewer.
So the old one is using DirectX5 and the new one DirectX9/OpenGL and is completely remade into the newer rendering engines? Which also is difficult since the game needs to be exactly the same as the old one in terms of gameplay.
The gameplay between the remaster and the original is close, but there's some minor differences under the hood that result in some different functions. Easiest comparison is calling them rounding errors; for 99.9% of players there is no difference. For people that mess around with the functionality of the game in some hacked custom maps, there are a couple things that do not work as they should in the remaster.
I bet the engine was separated in two parts, one that dealt with the operating system and the other that just produced frame buffers using the CPU.
If he could find a way to skip the anti-debugger protection , he would land on the reminiscent code of the Storm engine.
Remember that the game is entirely 2D and basically made without any acceleration at all.
Besides a BitBlt copying rects of pixels from one buffer to another.
@@sintanan469 I think the rounding errors are because they changed compilers and didn't pay attention to the change in behavior of the floating point math library.
That's very typical.
So, instead of open-sourcing an ancient abandonware game, they obfuscated already closed code... what a bunch of nice fellows...
Gotta say, your videos are the bomb
I never thought that "anti-debugging" is a thing 😮
Okay, now I'm curious if the free version is the same version that was included with the Starcraft 2 deluxe box. It included a copy of Starcraft on a USB thumb drive (shaped like Raynor's dog tag)
Would be interesting to see
Since Blizzard got access to the source code of StarCraft that they previously lost (look up that story of a kid getting a gold disc of the game, and subsequently being bullied/threatened by Blizzard to return it), i was expecting them to modify it for the remake/re-release.
If i could go back to the day i first played starcraft i would. Hardly any games match it in my childhood
Same dude and the cinematics were otherworldly, So many nights spent in dark rooms finishing maps to the end.
Storm gate now makes more sense for the new game made by OG starcraft2 developers
Really good analysis! Do you have a route on how to start the reverse engineering part in video games?
You need a goal with RE so I normally start with trying to answer a question “how does the ai work?”, “how does the rendering work?”, etc. As a practical starting point can’t go wrong by starting with strings
@@nathanbaggs thanks!
I still have the original and add on on cd
Maybe i am mistaken, but I swear there was a different free version that just ran straight away without all the online nonsense?🤔
You can still find unofficial downloads for the last “old” version, 1.16.1 from 2009, which still works fine but is missing both any new features and new issues that were introduced with the newer patches and Remastered from 2017 onward. The current free version is literally just Remastered with the paid features disabled.
Holy crap, I haven't thought of 'construct additional pylons' since 1998. Totally forgot about that.
your things you do
i love them
I find this video very interesting as a video game developer.
P.S. I am developing a Civ like video game.
Having the original Star Craft 1 code would be nice. Shame that guy some years ago returned it to Blizzard. I'd've loved to see that
Hey bro i need your help! I played a ton of Microsoft International Football 2000 when i was in school. Now, when i try to play it on Windows 10 and on a modern PC, i am unable to run it. Can you please inspect the game engine and tell me/us if it is possible to run it on Windows 10?
"Why is my virtual machine talking to me?"
Starcraft Remastered has "dynamic lighting" so there is a reason probably maybe that it has renderer thing idk.
hmmm
@@KingLich451 Is there something a miss?
OMG I freakin love SC!!!! And I love your vids!! What a perfect match.
These nostalgic games seem to be hitting the mark at the moment
sorry about the lateness of my comment but have you tried pc emu, instead of using a full vm just for running windows 7? if the game you are taking a look at is from before xp anyways, might as well use an emulator. there are quite a few and one of them focuses on accuracy, and has many settings to tinker with, like if your emulated computer has a 3dfx voodoo card, and if so which one. it accurately emulates the different 3dfx voodoo cards, so you can quickly test what one card would do over another one without actually buying the hardware or swapping them out/in.
Possibly more interesting information on the CD key thing, especially for other games... back in the day I was a poor kid in a poor household, and I wanted to play half-life. I acquired a copy from a friend but they wouldn't give me their CD key as they played counter strike all the time... so out of desperation I used my Starcraft CD key and it worked. I always wondered how many other games it would have worked for...
Also worth noting, I still remember my Starcraft CD key by memory to this day. xD
Those old days of software keys were wild. People made a lot of money guessing the check sum and selling the keys on the black market. That method doesn’t work in modern implementations.
I wonder if this version is a variation of the remaster with the old interface and graphics.
Do you think you can RE diablo? This may be interesting!
It's on my list (:
@@nathanbaggs Nice! Btw this video was great!
@@nathanbaggs You're going to run into the Storm.dll and MPQ files again with Diablo. Diablo 1 is when Blizzard created their archive system used for most their games. As far as my understanding of it, it was with Overwatch when they finally changed from the original MPQ archive file to their newer version of MPQ and stopped using Storm.dll to translate between the MPQ archive and the game's executable.
I love watching reverse engineering videos, even though I only have an amateur ability in C/C++ (I’m a PLC programmer; similar, but simplified, sort of). But I feel like the more I watch of these, the more I can learn by osmosis… that’s the plan anyways 😭
Not sure if anyone else mentioned ot. But you kinda look like the original Jim Raynor portrait in game.
I remember that I genuinely entered a random key and I got the game that easy... I then sold my key lol
I didn't want a tutorial on how to circumvent the key check. when I clicked this
You can just dump the process when its running and load that into IDA/Ghidra, their packer is not a big obstacle
Funnily enough I did try this but ghidra just spun for hours trying to process it, presumably I did something wrong
Heroes of the *Storm* is suddenly making a lot more sense now 😅
Thanks! 🙂
I'd love to see how a battle vs the anti-debug software might take place!
Whilst it would be fun to see how far I could push it I'm keen to not give away anything that would let people cheat in still active games
@@nathanbaggs An old game, or other software with similar self-preservation techniques would still be cool!
were you talking about bitblt? havnt heard that nasty bit of code in a while.