Newbies guide to cracking |   By ThrawN 
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A DIFFIRENT WAY TO CRACK GAME UPDATES

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Target: Age Of Sail II Update - V1.50
Website: http://www.talonsoft.com/
Time required: 5 mins or less
Tools required: Win32dasm, Hex Editor (www.ultraedit.com)
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Update consists of a readme and a exe (AOS2V150.exe). Run the update and asks for the dir. Since we dont have the game just use any dir. It says game not found :) hmm. Usaly i would check using filemon to see what its checking for and find out its checking for a ini file. When u create this file its then checking for options inside it so this makes it hard. But instead i choose to disasemble the updates exe. Inside there you would find some shit about unrar'in crap. So its a rar file somewhere.
Rar files have 4 bytes at the very beginning of every rar - 52 61 72 21 Convert that to string and it says Rar!.
So i opened the hex editor and checked out the update. Did a search for ascii 'rar!' and sure enough found it. If you scroll up a bit you will find typical crap you see at the end of a exe. So copy all the bytes from 52 61 72 21 to the very end. Create some bogus rar file and open that in the hex editor. Select all its bytes and paste over it. Save rar file and run and sure enough you got the games updated files. 

Very simple. Hope you learnt something from it.


Contact info:  thrawnc@hotmail.com   www.thrawn.da.ru