The Free Version Of StarCraft Is NOT What It Seems... 

Not the best video title. I watch you because I like your content but if I saw this without knowing your channel I wouldn't click it.

Thanks for the input - RU-vid titles are hard, I may swap several in and out depending on the performance. I'd be curious to know why you didn't like this specific title?

Its interesting, but I'm curious as a layman, what is the purpose? Are they trying to prevent reverse engineering? Are they trying to stop pirating? Or are they trying to prevent people from playing without having B.net?

I suspect they’re trying to stop people cheating

Glad you're enjoying them (:

Also my favorite content on this channel!

We'd of had it gold if the source code disk for starcraft 1 was leaked instead of returned.

Computers should only speak when spoken to

A few people have shared stories like this, which is fascinating. Thanks!

I have a similar memory that I had all but forgotten. Went to stay with my grandparents and brought the CD with me to install there but didn't have the key. Was frustrated and upset so I just spammed letters and numbers and got it on a few tries... Thought it was a miracle at the time 😂

I would feel some sort of mechanical sympathy for my VM, if VirtualBox didn't keep crashing (:

if VMs are butter bot does that make containers meseeks?

@@nathanbaggs Virtual Box is not a proper emulator, but a virtualization thingie. You need something like pcem.

As long as the butter is passed all is well.

I was really hoping someone would comment saying they tried this all those years a go (looks like you're not the only one!) (:

Yeah the technique they're using is called a checksum. It's not meant for security, it's meant to be used as error detection when transmitting/receiving data. If the data changed but the checksum didn't, there's an error somewhere in the message. This can be used for things like checking if the contents of a file have been tampered with by including a checksum of the file's contents in the file, assuming the user wasn't smart enough to fix the checksum while they were tampering with the data. If the program knows a file isn't supposed to change no matter what, they can keep a hard-coded copy of the checksum and detect if you changed the file even if you fixed the file's internal checksum. Of course, a smart user can just find the code that checks this and bypass it or edit the program's copy of the checksum to match the hacked file too...

Worked the same with credit card numbers ;)

@@alexxx4434 Credit cards just follow the Luhn Algorithm with the added check that the first digit identifies which type of card it is.

111-1111-1112

At first the classic graphics looked absolutely horrible when Blizzard released the remastered version with REALLY ugly upscaling. They improved it a bit since then, but it still doesn't look as good as SC BW 1.16.1 or before with a good ddraw.dll replacement.

Yes I agree it's the same with steaming services - everyone wants their slice of the pie

​It's the enshittification. Everything must be a cable-TV subscription instead of a Box product.

agreed,tho as legally i cant get StarCraft any other way it is what it is,i also hate how they promote their other games into my face when i only litteraly care about StarCraft,someone told me StarCraft characters appear in heroes of the storm,but all i got was some random world of warcraft character so 1 minute after installing it i deleted it,so if i could play StarCraft without a launcher it would sure feel refreshing but i guess you gotta do what you gotta do

It was a simpler time

@@nathanbaggs Not sure sure, today everything is Plug n' Play. Back in the day I recall spending hours slightly adjusting memory allocation in dos to get games to run in a stable manner, after all we only had 16 mb (and we had a lot for that time). I ended up memorizing what settings I needed for every game I wanted to play. Today you just hit the game icon on your phone and if it doesn't work you uninstall and try the next one.

Daemon tools, or Alcohol 120% , remember those tools? ❤

Thanks! They take a long time to make but I've been pretty overwhelmed by the positive response

Got to be careful with information like that

I get why they do it but I don’t want a different launcher for every game I play

​@@nathanbaggsI just make a shortcut of the gog .exes and launch them from steam.

​​​@@maryrose2676I think steam is a terrible launcher for a couple reasons. But then again it doesn't have much competition. Personally I like playnite over every launcher out. I have all my GOG, console, and steam games on it.

@@bluetooth2677 I play with a lot of mods, Steam's native mod support is what drew me in. But I agree. For games without mod support, I don't use steam. Personally, the best game launcher I have is my games folder. Playnite seems interesting. Looking at it now. Thanks for mentioning it.

​@@bluetooth2677why do you think it is terrible? I'm sincerely curious

Thanks for the insight, I'll admit to not going too deep on version comparison. It was whatever version i could find for both 1998 and 2017

@@nathanbaggs Yeah, it's still interesting, nevertheless.

The updated version he got from BattleNet would be the same version number as the latest Remastered patch, so 1.23.10 or whatever, because the modern free version is just Remastered with the new graphics and some other features disabled. This can be pretty obvious from the fact that the free version has a massively bloated file size compared to older versions, because it still includes all the Remastered files. I believe that a lot of the differences between it and the last legacy version, 1.16.1 from 2009, actually go back to the 1.17 and 1.18 patches that were released in 2017 during the run-up to Remastered’s release. Most mods ever made for the game need 1.16.1 or an earlier version, even many newer ones made after the new patches, because the new patches broke a bunch of things and were more difficult to mod than the earlier versions.

That’s a shame, did you go back to the original?

@@nathanbaggs No, I don't know how to do it, if it's even possible.

I get the feeling it's something they felt they needed to include but didn't put a lot of effort into

What if they explicitly made low effort in that place in a move against capitalization?

At the time when sc came out most developers knew that their games would be cracked and warezed before it hit the shelves anyway, so most implementations had the same spirit as how locks only keep honest thieves out.

They have to do something to prevent cheaters though right?

@@nathanbaggs true but then what happens when they become the cheaters? :)

I was really hoping someone would comment saying they tried this all those years a go (:

​@@nathanbaggs pretty sure it worked just to enter the game (single-player), to acces the battle-net we used BNGatewayEditor to edit the server list and add our private servers though

@@nathanbaggs I also remember putting 3's or 1's and it worked perfectly every time :)

A few people have shared stories about guessing a valid key, at least now we know why (:

You can still find unofficial downloads for the last “old” version, 1.16.1 from 2009, which still works fine but is missing both any new features and new issues that were introduced with the newer patches and Remastered from 2017 onward. The current free version is literally just Remastered with the paid features disabled.

Ah interesting, thanks!

​@@nathanbaggsDiablo, D2, StarCraft, Warcraft 2 and 3 all use storm.dll. its primary use is reading the MPQ files used to store game data for these games, though the DLL also contains functions relating to networking, memory management, and such.

@@Bobbias WoW also used Storm until Wrath of the Lich King when they changed the rendering engine to allow for higher quality rendering on in-game cutscenes when you don't have control of the camera.

@@sintanan469 ahh, I somehow completely blanked on that one.

@@Bobbias It's actually pretty funny in the WoW case. The terrain generation is the War3 map render just expanded on with larger maps. Terrain features and pathing maps are added to original 2004 vanilla WoW just like map makers did for War3 and TFT custom maps. In theory if War3 could handle WoW map sizes you could just port the terrain over 1-to-1 because the maps are encoded the same way War3 encodes maps, too. Turns out when you give fans the keys to the kingdom with reverse engineering Storm.dll and .mpq files for six years, people knew how to edit WoW day 1.

It didn’t occur to me till after filming that there’s probably an OpenGL renderer for the original as it was also release on mac

hmmm

@@KingLich451 Is there something a miss?

Same dude and the cinematics were otherworldly, So many nights spent in dark rooms finishing maps to the end.

The gameplay between the remaster and the original is close, but there's some minor differences under the hood that result in some different functions. Easiest comparison is calling them rounding errors; for 99.9% of players there is no difference. For people that mess around with the functionality of the game in some hacked custom maps, there are a couple things that do not work as they should in the remaster.

I bet the engine was separated in two parts, one that dealt with the operating system and the other that just produced frame buffers using the CPU. If he could find a way to skip the anti-debugger protection , he would land on the reminiscent code of the Storm engine. Remember that the game is entirely 2D and basically made without any acceleration at all. Besides a BitBlt copying rects of pixels from one buffer to another.

​​@@sintanan469 I think the rounding errors are because they changed compilers and didn't pay attention to the change in behavior of the floating point math library. That's very typical.

Funnily enough I did try this but ghidra just spun for hours trying to process it, presumably I did something wrong

It's on my list (:

@@nathanbaggs Nice! Btw this video was great!

@@nathanbaggs You're going to run into the Storm.dll and MPQ files again with Diablo. Diablo 1 is when Blizzard created their archive system used for most their games. As far as my understanding of it, it was with Overwatch when they finally changed from the original MPQ archive file to their newer version of MPQ and stopped using Storm.dll to translate between the MPQ archive and the game's executable.

You need a goal with RE so I normally start with trying to answer a question “how does the ai work?”, “how does the rendering work?”, etc. As a practical starting point can’t go wrong by starting with strings

@@nathanbaggs thanks!

Would be interesting to see

I'm more interested in how they are different

This is likely correct and relates to Windows 7 and DirectDraw. If I remember correctly, I believe Windows 7 didn't handle DirectDraw by default without users using compatibility mode or altering settings in directdiag

Indeed I'd love a comparison between the free one and the last patch of the original.

But I wanted to know why all 3’s was valid

If google translate worked for me then I’m glad you enjoyed it!

StarCraft.

@@woldemunster9244 I blame my spell checker

In the video, he also looks at OpenGL for the new version. Probably used OpenGL back then, too.

I would expect the mac version to use OpenGL, although I'll admit to not looking into it. Given the time frame I would expect it to be old school fixed function pipeline OpenGL - so still different to this new version

It wasn’t ”also released” on Mac, the same release, the same CDs and all, worked on both Mac and Windows.

I'm as surprised as you are, but as far as I can tell that's what the code does

Yes. That was common back in the day. See how credit card numbers have same concept.

@@0xeb- It's not the same concept at all. A credit card number will have a check digit that depends on the other numbers. So you can't just guess a credit card number by changing the last digit. This, as far as I understand, simply checks if the last digit is something, and doesn't care at all about the other numbers.

@filipstamate1564 - it calculates the checksum from the first 14 digits and compares that to the 15th, which means there's only 10 possible outputs

Which is exactly the same as a credit card, like 0xeb- said.

Whilst it would be fun to see how far I could push it I'm keen to not give away anything that would let people cheat in still active games

@@nathanbaggs An old game, or other software with similar self-preservation techniques would still be cool!

the free version yes, i believe i still have the disc

🐢

These nostalgic games seem to be hitting the mark at the moment

Он взял очевидно различающиеся версии игры и убедился, что они таки различаются.

в ремастере стоит защита от дебаггера поэтому он не смог его нормально изучить, поэтому видео достаточно бессмысленное. А так, все как сказал комментатор выше.

@@sdjhgfkshfswdfhskljh3360 спасибо. я так и понял. но не понял для чего , думал может вторая часть будет где он к 1й подкинет второй принцип ренедера или еще чего нибудь.

@@fenathesnake очень бессмысленное. а чего он изначально хотел, он ведь тоже не обозначил?

@@bishopcupoison4550 вначале говорит, что хочет посмотреть насколько отличается рендер (отрисовка графики). Итог: в оригинале используется DirectX 5, в ремастере DirectX 9/OpenGL (что достаточно очевидно и без реверса) В принципе видео для людей увлекающихся реверс-инжинирингом, интересно посмотреть как чел разбирает игры и какой инструментарий использует, для остальных полезной инфы тут нет.

Where’s the fun in that (:

I had fun, so not a wasted effort. And now we know why all threes works (:

@@nathanbaggs Indeed. BTW, I think one other Blizz game acepted fours as its key, but I'm not sure which one.

I'll admit to not having played with rust yet, so I don't really have an opinion. Languages arn't "dead" till people stop using them and there's a lot of C++ out there

@@nathanbaggs you are a great person . thank you for your videos

C++ is nowhere near dead and probably won't be well and truly dead for like 50+ years at a minimum. COBOL is still alive, despite being much older than C++ and having far fewer use cases. COBOL is still important because the machines that run it are massive expensive mainframes and while the code is old, it still runs and nobody wants to have to rewrite it. In C++'s case things will be different. The language has orders of magnitude more programmers, it's still being actively developed, and there are more use cases than COBOL. While Rust can replace it for some use cases, it is not a silver bullet. The borrow checker errs on the side of caution, making it much harder to do some things in rust, and making certain code that is perfectly safe an error because the borrow checker can't prove that it is safe. In addition, rust relies on LLVM, which does not support every platform that C++ can be compiled on. This further limits Rust. Rust is also not the only alternative to C++ for systems programming, so even if C++ was dead, Rust can't possibly claim to be the one that killed it. There's Zig, Odin, Zephyr, C3, Carbon, D, Herb Sutter's cppfront (or whatever it's being called now), and many others out there that you could conceivably choose instead of C++, depending on what your goals are.