Taslin: I have worked as a developer before, But have no affiliation with With Microsoft or Digital Anvil. In both cases we have mutual friends though.
I Guess now I say who I am to those who may know me. Hopefully know one really cares
Before an Illness Took me out of the loop last year,
I was known on the net as Abomonog.
My last job was as a writer for Gamespy Industries on The Planetquake website.
But Before then I helped on the Developement of the Painkeep Arena mod for Team Evolve and I was one of the Beta Tester on Sierra's Starsiege/TribesSeries.
I didn't want to post the guaranteed fix because, even though I know for a fact the the fix would work, it would also open the game up to piracy. What made me decide to at least make the fix available to the truly desperate was something that a tech guy at Interplay told me once. "It's far better to lose money from a thief than to lose money to dissatisfied customers." Said basically while handing me a cracked copy of Carmageddon 2 because the CD check in the store bought version didn't work with my CDrom. So now I go from BBS to BBS doing tech support service on games that I have and hopefully making friends in the prossess.
The problem with copy protection is that in the only time it was really working was when the Commodore 64 was the only real major PC out there. Back then you did your own protection and if anyone wanted to break it, they had to start fresh with each game. Today, there are only 4 different types of copy protection out there so all one has to do now is download a simple application that will defeat it. As Wydom@ker just learned, Basic everyday cdrom burning programs are now being designed to defeat copy protection. Why? Because it's real easy to do. Music CD protection is totally useless, If you can't rip it, just use your wav editor to record the playback. Yet they still try.
But the idea of this thread was to fix the install problem and indeed, I have found another solution. For some (but not all) of you trying to install but getting errors the following may just work.
Try this: Instead of installing the cd from the Autorun Menu. Instead, shut down the Autorun menu and run the setup.exe on the root of the CDdrive. Or just open the run dialog and type d:/setup.exe (where d is the letter of your CD drive).
Wydom@ker: If you still have the origonal CD, just put it in your CD drive and run the game, it should work. Key numbers are randomly generated with certain factors like hardware present and Windows version being influencers. I'm sure there is also a strict format because one cannot dictate their own numbers (I've already tried this). you may also try to load up your image in daemon with the CD protection set to Safedisk emulation. It's not 100% but it may just fool the Freelancer CD check when you try and run the game.
This means that everytime you install the game, the serial number is different, even if nothing else has changed.
I know of more than one unlucky player that has learned that the hard way.
If anyone has actually emailed me, I haven't check yet, but you 'll get the reply tonight.
Sat Mar 29, 2003 11:17 am