How to crack "The Neverhood" CD-Check


Welcome to yet another tutorial by me! I have just recently got this oldie (it was released
in 1996!), because I wanted to play it. The problem was that I had to return this game 
to the friend who gave it to me after 1 day, and I don't have a burner. So I figured I will
try and rip it, so it could stay as long as I want it on my computer!

First I installed the game. Installation only requires 5 megs of your Hard disk, because
all the movies are in the CD. After you install the game, remove the CD from the drive,
and click on NHC.exe. You get that message "Error Reading CDROM". Disassemble the file
and look for the string ref's in Win32Dasm. After you found it, you'll notice that that
messagebox is not really helpfull, since you can't get to the real CD-Check. That's 
what I figured out when I first tried. 

It might sound odd, but the saved games are saved inside the registry. You can figure that
out by looking in the string ref's. Go to the registry and look for the installation path:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\DreamWorks Interactive\Neverhood

You'll see this kind of data:

Data Drive=D:\
PID=54767-442-5719094-59095
Installed Directory=C:\Program Files\DreamWorks Interactive\Neverhood
Run File"=C:\Program Files\DreamWorks Interactive\Neverhood\NHC
KBPS_CD=00002800
KBPS=00002800
Installed=00000001

After you see this, you ought to understand what to do!
all you have to do, is simply change the "Data Drive" value into ".".
Why? Because the app is looking for 'D:\' which is my CD-Rom drive.
If you change that value to '.' it will simply look for the data in the current directory
where the HNC.exe file is located. But you cannot really play unless you copy the entire
Data directory from within the CD-Rom (over 600 megs).

In order to completely finish this crack, you'll have to create a RegPatch file (a .reg 
file). This is how it should look like:

<----- Begin RegSetup.reg ------->


REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\DreamWorks Interactive\Neverhood]
"Data Drive"="."


<-----  End RegSetup.reg  ------->


Pretty simple isn't it?

BTW, Neverhood is one of the most enjoyable games I have ever played!


Have fun... :)



WhizKiD
halokshoorim@hotmail.comTo: KERNEL32.GetVolumeInformationA, Ord:0177h <-- another checking