Getting firefight to work on win7

Firefight's a game made by chaos works, in 1996

Surprisingly it works on windows 7 with little effort, and without the need to use windows compatibility mode

After a little debugging, the reason it doesn't run on windows 7 (both LOADER.EXE and FIREFGHT.EXE) is because of a bug in the program using SetWindowsHookExA with thread id as null

The bug doesn't manifest itself under win98

The thread id value is filled after this call instead of before it

I didn't dig deeper into this, this probably changed after win98
from msdn: "An error may occur if the hMod parameter is NULL and the dwThreadId parameter is zero"

there's also a small cd check in FIREFGHT.EXE, patching this makes the game work

I've uploaded the patched files here, if you need them
http://www.mediafire.com/?omab7605dwwh7ek

ps.

if you want to get this game, you could probably find it on the internet somewhere
if not, send me an email

eset crackme 2011

Go check out eset's new 2011 crackme
http://2011.confidence.org.pl/

It shares some stuff from their 2010 confidence crackme

I'd rate this 3/10 on a crackmes.de scale

here's an example name/key

simonzack
9f6d5eab-dtdlcdp3asalclsatpt1

will publish a solution here when confidence ends

Getting nfs high stakes to work better on win7

Years back, I played this game all the time
After playing some of the much more recent shift 2, and failing to get past the drifting (dont have a steering wheel :( ) thought of playing this again, this time on windows 7

There already exist many good tutorials getting it to work on 7
but there are a few small problems
the patch (v4.50) runs the game using PatchNFS.exe
starting this up always redirects the game to the network play screen, displays an "Unkown error" (network connection failed probably due to server changes in the past 10 years), there are no title movies, and the game needs to mount the iso to play

So I started looking at the exe to see if I could make some changes

the main nfs exe: nfshs.exe, is no longer securom protected in the patch, this makes things much easier

starting up this exe gives us an error message telling what arguments are needed
these are probably passed by the loader PatchNFS.exe

searching for the movie file locations can lead to where the movie's played

I found this here:

mov eax, offset aEatumble_mad ; "EAtumble.mad"
call playMovie
mov eax, offset aNfstitle_mad ; "NFStitle.mad"

here EAtumble refers to the ea logo, NFStitle is the game intro

going into the next call tells us there's a flag thats needed to be unset to allow the movie to play (this also starts up the network play)

after debugging a bit, this flag is set during the arguments parsing

if the game is started using -PatchRestart, the flag is set

looking at the parsing a little more reveals that there must be at least 1 argument set for the game to start

the only other argument is -D3D%d

I tried starting the game using -D3D9
and there it is, the title screen and logo all back, some of the game graphics options open up too

now onto the second problem, removing the need to insert the cd
the cd checks are simple to bypass
but after trying to start the game, we are greeted with some sound files not found message

debugging a bit, the sound files paths are overridden for some file types, located here:
HKLM\Software\Electronic Arts\Need For Speed High Stakes\1.0 SrcDrive

change the path to whatever your installation path is, copy over the sound and movie files, and the game starts perfectly without the need to mount an iso

here's the diffs if you need them
F7324 75 > EB
F737C 75 > EB
104045 74CC > 9090

have fun playing this old classic