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Old 09-06-2009, 19:46
TempoMat TempoMat is offline
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Branded Games like Cellphones?

I hardly play games or have any on my computers besides the usual ones which comes with Win OS, but due to my work, which see me flying for hours to destinations in different continents, I use to play the game Bejeweled 2 Deluxe from TopCap instead of watching films for instance. Now at home and on a long vacation I decided to search for a desktop version and consulted the favourite search engine, and here comes the reason for this post.

There were several hit for the Bejeweled 2 Deluxe from different Games distributors. At first I thought only the usual platforms for shareware software distribution and jsut went ahead and downloaded some of them from Spintop Games, BigFish Games, some other sites and of course directly from PopCap. I installed at least 3 of them and realised they are all the same but somehow branded and with different protections. The one from Spintop Games for instance was armadillo protected but the original one from PopCap was not.

Recently I decided to try Bookwurm Adventures Deluxe v 1.0.1.100 from PopCap which was fully functional trial version with some hidden delays in loading sequences and became addicted. This version is protected with RSA-95 and MD5. There are keygens for older versions were the protection asks for RegName and RegCode but this particular version only ask for a release code, which I guess should be a string of the RegName and RegCode as both are used in the reg routine. I was able to put a dummy RegName and RegCode in the Registry to locate and follow the routine for checking the registration info.

The Algo hashes a string derived from "RegName+Char(10)+(a Progie Specific string in this case "WinBAD") with MD5 and RSA, then does another transformation with some Hardware IDs from GetVolumeInformationA and some weird stuff with the serial before the compare and there is where I am currently stuck. Patching will not be easy from what I could see in several hours of tracing.

Searching for other alternatives, I found out that the same game is again branded with Spintop-Games, Reflexive and few others. For the Reflexive one there are unwrappers around, so I just used one to unwrap it, but for learning purposes I am interested in the routine from PopCap. I will check the one from Spintop Games and if it is again protected with Armadillo I try to manually unpack it, which in the case of the Bejeweled 2 unlocks the game fully also.

What I am asking myself is how PopCap could distribute the software itself as well as 'license" (assuming it is the right term) them to these game houses which offer them with only molded intros at different prices. If they were to sell the rights, then they wouldn't and shouldn't be distributing them directly as well? Or?
Could it also be that the game houses only sell and get their commissions?

Regards,
TempoMat
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