This message showed when I entered the serial specifically made for pirates. Right now feeling nothing but respect for plugin devs. Next month Imma buy this plugin 100% fixed, need it or don’t need it doesn’t matter anymore lol.
I feel piracy for demo purposes is fully justified if you buy it after you like it. People always say vote with your wallet but it’s more like gambling with your wallet if you don’t get to see and touch the product before you make the purchase. Giving proper demos should be more common with digital media.
I played it as part of Xbox live, paid $20 for 2 months. Ended up playing a lot more of Senua Sacrifice than I did Starfield.
That price is very acceptable, almost a convenience fee that I gladly pay so I don’t have to look for torrents and stuff.
I would never pay the hyperinflated prices that are being asked for AAA nowadays, especially for digital copies that, as PlayStation is keen to teach us, are worthless.
I'm thinking that I might buy it once we have creation kit access and mods that add story and flesh out the game a la Fusion City Rising and companion mods for Fallout 4
Not entirely or at least in a different way. Steam still has free weekends occasionally on games. Or more likely some publishers still offer them sometimes probably
Devolver Digital published a demo for Heave Ho!. Worked fine, demo was fun, decided to buy the full version. It didn’t work, none of the UI elements except the back button worked on the character selection screen. Fortunately Valve is good with refunds.
Imo “vote with your wallet” is more about companies/brands that have proven to do shitty games, as in “don’t buy any more games/dlcs/microtransactions from them”.
Vote with your wallet regards any sort of purchase. By giving money to someone you are giving them the most encouragement possible to continue doing what they’re doing. If you purchase something that you end up not liking, they will still receive your initial vote loud and clear. The gaming industry especially has shown us that companies will happily take both the money and the negative review and say ‘thank you’.
You’re the first person in this community that gets it. The people here that bloviate about their moral justifications are so tiresome. It’s really as simple as “if you want more of something, you have to pay for it”.
Yes, but as you said, you can’t know if you’ll like the game or not until you try it. It works with standalone games as well if you pirate before buying, but it’s usually not aimed at pirates: no one sane will pirate a game, find out they dislike it, and buy it anyway. It goes without saying.
It’s more the people who already bought games that need to hear that “so you bought the last two mainline Pokémon games and they both sucked ass? Don’t fall for it again, vote with your wallet and stay away from the next one”.
Old enough to remember the Ambrosia Software game, Escape Velocity? That game had a shareware setup involving a really powerful ship that would message you several times in a game and eventually get so annoying it was almost impossible to play. If you accidentally shot him, he’s ruin you. Oh, gone are the days of true “try before you buy.”
Usually, not intentionally. More, I was defending myself and he was buzzing around me like a moth on a summer porch light when a stray laser beam hit his ship. :(
lol, EV was special. It was also pretty easy to mod with plug-ins using macos resource fork hackery, even to a kid, and all of the original game data was replaceable just by creating something with the same ID in a plug-in. Cap’n Hector became an angry invincible shuttlecraft with a single laser cannon. now that I’m old enough to afford a license, the company is gone and there’s no way, so I guess I’m stuck with him like this forever.
I make no claim to this info, nor do I understand it, nor do I take responsibility for its use. As linked, I got this from a reddit post about the company and copy/pasted it into Obsidian so I’d have it. The code blocks are as close to the original as I cared to fiddle with. This is all greek to me but there are Python scripts linked, which may help you generate a key that works to register EV. Good luck!
Note: I had to split this into multiple posts cause it was not wanting to post the entire thing in one reply.
Now that Ambrosia is gone, new registrations are no longer possible, and due to their expiring codes, using legitimate license keys has become difficult. We may hope to see a few of their games revived in the future but at present, only the original releases are available. Perhaps this case study on Ambrosia’s registration algorithms will be useful to some.
The Old System
In their earliest days, ASW didn’t require registration, but they eventually began locking core features away behind codes. All of their classic titles use the original algorithm by Andrew Welch.
Given a licensee name, number of copies, and game name, the code generator runs through two loops. The first loop iterates over each letter of the capitalized licensee name, adding the ASCII representation of that letter with the number of copies and then rotating the resulting bits. The second loop repeats that operation, only using the game’s name instead of the license holder’s name.
Beginning with Mars Rising, later games added a step to these loops: XOR the current code with the common hex string $DEADBEEF. However, the rest of the algorithm remained essentially unchanged.
The resulting 32 bits are converted into a text registration code by adding the ASCII offset of $41 to each hex digit. This maps the 32-bit string into 8 characters, but due to the limit of a hex digit to only encode 16 values, codes only contain letters from the first 16 of the alphabet.
The following chart shows an example using a well-known hacked code for Slithereens.
Here is a Python implementation of the v1 system: aswreg_v1.py
Once you have the bit-string module installed via sudo pip install bitstring, you can test the output yourself with python aswreg_v1.py “Anonymous” 100 “Slithereens”.
As Ambrosia’s Matt Slot explains, the old system continued to allow a lot of piracy, so in the early 2000’s they decided to switch to a more challenging registration system. This new method was based on polynomial hashing and included a timestamp so that codes could be expired and renewed. Ambrosia now had better control over code distribution, but they assumed their renewal server would never be shut down…
They also took more aggressive steps to reduce key sharing. The registration app checks against a list of blacklisted codes, and if found to be using one, the number of licenses is internally perturbed so that subsequent calculations fail. To combat tampering, your own information can get locally blacklisted in a similar manner if too many failed attempts occur, at least until the license file is deleted. Furthermore, the app attempts to verify the system time via a remote time server to minimize registration by changing the computer’s clock.
You can disable the internet connection, set the clock back, and enter codes. There’s also a renewal bot for EV: Nova. But let us look at the algorithm more closely.
64-bit Codes
The first noticeable difference is that registration codes in v2 are now 12 digits, containing both letters and numbers. This is due to a move from a 32-bit internal code to a 64-bit one. Rather than add an ASCII offset to hex digits, every letter or number in a new registration code has a direct mapping to a chunk of 5 bits. Using 5 bits per digit supports up to 32 values, or almost all letters of the alphabet and digits up to 9 (O, I, 0, and 1 were excluded given their visual similarities).
The resulting 64 bits (really only 60 because the upper 4 are unused: 12 digits * 5 bits each = 60) are a combination of two other hashes XOR’d together. This is a notable change from v1 because it only used the registration code to verify against the hashing algorithm. Only the licensee name, number of copies, and game name were really used. In v2, the registration code is itself a hash which contains important information like a code’s timestamp.
Two Hashes
To extract such information from the registration code, we must reverse the XOR operation and split out the two hashes which were combined. Fortunately, XOR is reversible, and we can compute one of the hashes. The first hash, which I’ll call the userkey, is actually quite similar to v1’s algorithm. It loops through the licensee name, adding the ASCII value, number of copies, and shifting bits. This is repeated with the game name. An important change is including multiplication by a factor based on the string size.
The second hash, which I’ll call the basekey, is the secret sauce of v2; it’s what you pay Ambrosia to generate when registering a product. It is not computed by the registration app, but there are several properties by which it must be validated.
The chart below visualizes the relationships among the various hashes, using the well-known “Barbara Kloeppel” code for EV: Nova.
Timestamp are encoded as a single byte comprised of bits indexed at b56,51,42,37,28,23,14,9 from the basekey. In this example, the timestamp is 01100010 or 0x62 or 98.
The timestamp represents the number of fortnights that have passed since Christmas Day, 2000 Eastern time, modulo 256 to fit in one byte. For example, 98 fortnights places the code at approximately October 2004.
Stored as a single byte, there are 256 unique timestamps. This is 512 weeks or about 10 years. Yes, this means that a code’s validity rotates approximately once every decade.
After the code’s timestamp is read, it is subtracted from the current timestamp (generated from the system clock or network time server if available). The difference must be less than 2, so codes are valid for 4 weeks or about a month at a time.
Of note, Pillars of Garendall has a bug in which the modulo is not taken correctly, so the timestamp corresponding to 0xFF is valid without expiry.
Validity Check
The last three bits, b60-63, contain the sum of all other 3-bit chunks in the basekey, modulo 7. Without the correct number in these bits, the result will be considered invalid.
To this point, we have covered sufficient material to renew licenses. The timestamp can be changed, the last three bits updated, the result XOR’d with the userkey, and finally, the code converted from binary to text.
Factors for Basekey Generation
I was next curious about code generation. For the purposes of this write-up, I have not fully reverse engineered the basekey, only duplicated the aspects which are used for validation. This yields functional keys, just not genuine ones. If the authors of the EV: Nova renewal bot have fully reversed the algorithm, perhaps they will one day share the steps to genuine basekey creation.
One aspect validated by the registration app is that the licensee name, number, and game name can be modified to yield a set of base factors. These are then multiplied by some number and written into the basekey. We do not need the whole algorithm; we simply must check that the corresponding regions in the basekey are multiples of the appropriate factors.
The regions of note in the basekey are f1 = b5-9,47-51,33-37,19-23, f2 = b43-47,29-33,15-19,57-61, and f3 = b24-28,10-14,52-56,38-42. The top 5 bits and f3 are never actually checked, so they can be ignored.
Considering f1 and f2, the values in the sample basekey are 0x25DA and 0x1500, respectively. The base factors are 0x26 and 0x1C, which are multiples by 0xFF and 0xC0, respectively.
Rather than analyze the code in detail, I wrote a small script to translate over the disassembled PPC to Python wholesale. It is sufficient for generating keys to EV: Nova, using the perfectly-valid multiple of 1x, but I have found it fails for other v2 products.
With bitstring installed, you can renew codes like python aswreg_v2.py renew “L4B5-9HJ5-P3NB” “Barbara Kloeppel” 1 “EV Nova” (just sample syntax, blacklisted codes will still fail in the app). There’s also a function to check a code’s timestamp with date or create a new license with generate.
As earlier cautioned, generating basekeys relies on code copied from disassembled PPC and will likely not work outside EV: Nova. In my tests with other v2 products, all essential parts of the algorithm remain the same, even the regions of the basekey which are checked as multiples of the factors. What differs is the actual calculation of base factors. Recall that these keys were created by Ambrosia outside the local registration system, so the only options are to copy the necessary chunks of code to make passable factors for each product or to fully reverse engineer the basekey algorithm. I’ve no doubt the factors are an easy computation once you know the algorithm, but code generation becomes less critical when renewal is an option for other games. I leave it to the authors of the Zeus renewal bot if they know how to find these factors more generally.
To renew codes for other games, keep in mind the name must be correct. For instance, Pillars of Garendall is called “Garendall” internally. You can find a game’s name by typing a gibberish license in the registration app and seeing what file is created in Preferences. It should be of the form License.
Finally, a couple disclaimers: I have only tested with a handful of keys, so my interpretations and implementations may not be completely correct. YMMV. Furthermore, these code snippets are posted as an interesting case study about how a defunct company once chose to combat software piracy, not to promote piracy. Had Ambrosia remained operational, I’m sure we would have seen a v3 registration system or a move to online-based play as so many other games are doing today, but I hope this has been helpful for those who still wish to revisit their favorite Ambrosia classics.
I have a link to how to take an old serial for the game and generate a new serial based on the algorithm. When I get back to my computer I’ll send it along.
I remember this game being one of the reasons I love Macs so much as a younger kid. Zooming around and then this guy showing up “remember to buy the game” and then, eventually, it becoming a game of seeing if I could leave a system before getting wrecked by him.
Good times.
If you happen to miss those days, check out Endless Sky. It’s a free remake of the game for more modern machines. Still under active development.
I can’t find the video, but I remember someone at Ableton said they pretty much had the same view of Live piracy. If someone pirates it, they weren’t willing to spend the money on it, but perhaps they will be willing to in the future.
For creative software like that, the vast majority of people getting it pirated are amateurs, and if they get good enough, they’ll eventually be paying back.
Same thing with photoshop, if I hadn’t pirated it, I NEVER would have developed the skill set required to use it effectively. Piracy is the company getting thousands of future potential customers for free. How many thousands of people pirated it and went on to work professionally and pay for it? Adobe wouldn’t be near what it is without piracy.
I had a similiar experience with Mount and Blade warband, I pirated to try it, bought it after and when it didn’t work the folks at TaleWorlds helped me out fix the issue. Absolute lads.
The caveat is that it has to be easy for people to find it and buy it without jumping through hoops. If you gotta jump through hoops just to buy it, you might as well jump through hoops and get it for free.
Reminds me of everyone pirating the Mass Effect trilogy through 2015 until the remaster released because it was literally the only way to get all three games, with all of the dlc.
I really don’t think this is true though, the cost of piracy is severely low when compared to buying it, I can see myself downloading some shit games just to play them for 15-30 minutes but I’d never buy them.
I don’t really understand what it has to do with buying the game but yeah I probably would since I’d rather have the unlimited experience in case the game is halfway decent.
True. I would never pay for AC Rogue, and after having completed the game, I can justify that decision. To me, it felt lile Black Flag but worse. Could I justify but I Black Flag on Steam, after already paying for it on PS4? Yes. Could I justify any purchase of Rogue? No, none.
I completed it because I started it (and it’s a shorter game), not because I was actually invested. I’ve played Black Flag 3 times, I’ve paid for it once, and would both replay it and pay for it again. I’ve played Rogue once, and I have no intention of replaying or paying for it.
You didn’t, you typed the words “I understand”, which isn’t acknowledgement of comprehension, exactly the same as it is when you “accept the EULA” after not having read it. The very thing that has been deemed non-defensible for EULA litigation.
You don’t even need to acknowledge the thing, it could just be a splash screen.
Again, nothing to do with “non-defensible” or anything related to a Eula. It’s merely a recognition the key is pirated to remove your defenses if a lawsuit happens.
Clearly the joke of my parent comment sailed way over your head. But hey mansplain things incorrectly for the rest of class.
What precedent? You keep claiming it’s related to an EULA, which is wholefully misplaced and have provided no evidence to support this.
There is plenty of precedence that merely a sign or other notice is admissible in court, but again, this has nothing to do with admissibility, it is just so you can’t claim you didn’t know you used a pirated cdkey. Which has precedence has a defence, so they have an already precedented way of dealing with it.
I’m sorry you missed my clear joke in my parent comment, but good to know pointing out your folly is “losing my cool” lmfao.
I’m I’m wrong I would love to see the supporting evidence so I don’t mislead people in the future, but I also know you’re full of shit. So feel free to block me, don’t care.
A notice is court admissible, this is a notice, not an agreement or an acknowledgement, sorry. Has nothing to do with admissibility, Would love to see your homework that disproves this. But it’s moot since it’s not for them to admit as we’ve established already quite clearly.
Lmfao you know who doesn’t leave a conversation after saying they were going to? Someone who never meant to have a discussion in good faith. I’ll save you the trouble and just block the troll instead.
How can they sue you if they literally say they don’t oppose the use of this pirated serial and it’s okay to do and the software will continue working?
If anything if you agree to this you can sue them if they ever disable this key because they agreed to accept it.
Do you really think this is a contract or agreement of legal enforceability? Holy hell.
If they actually used this for that reason it would be to merely remove your defense of saying you didn’t know you bought a pirated copy. They don’t even need you to agree to it, a splash screen would be enough.
Look up the legal principle of estoppel. In general you can’t turn around and sue someone for doing something after informing them (in writing no less) that you’re okay with it, even if you would otherwise have had a valid basis to sue.
I am not a lawyer, but… This does not prove you’re pirating the software. It’s informing the customer (who, as far as they may be aware, obtained the key in a totally legit manner) that the company thinks the key to be a pirated key (of which, it might not actually be, but, rather identified as such by the company or software in error). It is definitely designed to illicit some form of guilt if you did in-fact pirate the software (which is between you and your conscience), but it is not proof that you pirated it. That said, I totally back what this company is doing!
Doesn’t matter how you acquired the key, it’s still a pirated copy.
Do you think buying a stolen car or phone changes that it’s still stolen? Plenty of places also have laws against buying or keeping knowingly stolen items. So even just being informed and you continuing to keep it can now be used against you as well.
That’s the key, though… KNOWINGLY stolen! If you purchased an item but where unaware that it was stolen, there’s no legal issue and, unless there’s something that can link that item back to it’s original owner… I guess it’s yours then.
As far as the digital key is concerned, this is even more nebulous. Sure, their database or software thinks the key is stolen, but that’s just a binary bit somewhere which could, by accident or by a bug in the software, be in error. If, as a purchaser, you were unaware that the dealer from which you purchased said key was selling keys illegally, they is the same as buying a stolen TV from the flea market. Unless you knew, you did nothing wrong. As for the software telling you it’s stolen… again, that’s only what the software things. It could be wrong.
Additionally, purchasing suspect keys is even more legal as there’s no intrinsic value to the key itself. It’s just a string of numbers and symbols. Keep it, it’s yours. Have fun. Play hangman. The company who owns the software for which that key was intended… didn’t loose anything. They still have their software. If the key worked? Well, if the key worked, that means the company and/or software doesn’t think the key stolen or otherwise illegitimate (which, can also be an error on the companies part).
In this case, the company says, in essence, “We think this key is stolen, but we cannot prove you did the stealing. We’re not going to belabor the issue. Keep on, and let your conscience guide you”
Sounds like that may rankle your sense of right and wrong, but, them’s the fact. You have never seen someone arrested for purchasing a software key, nor have you seen anyone arrested for purchasing a physical product they believed to be legit even when it wasn’t.
Uhh… what do you think the notice is telling you…? That’s it’s not a legal copy. Now you can’t claim you didn’t know… this is literally a legally accepted measure to remove that entire defense that you didn’t know. It’s hilarious you comprehend that, but don’t see how this notifies you of it being illegal! It’s along the same veins of reselling a book without its cover and the notice telling you. Of course it’s legal and accepted to remove your ignorance defense. Ignorance has never been a defense and this would be no different.
And yeah people have been arrested for those before, of course I haven’t personally seen it. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
Actually, no… it’s telling you that it thinks it’s not a legal copy. The company doesn’t actually know. It’s not like they sit down and write out by hand every key that is created. Those keys are generated by some algorithm. The company can identify if an algorithm was compromised (either the generation method identified or a significant portion of keys from said algorithm being used without them having been generated by the company), or they surmise that a chunk of codes, that had been previously generated for distribution, were nabbed when a number of them start to get activated without the company seeing a corresponding increase in sales. They more than likely do not have an exact list of which codes were stolen, just an assumption.
Here’s an example for ya… Company gives Legit LTD a set of codes to sell. Unfortunately, the thieves seal hack into Legit LTD’s systems and are able to copy a chunk of those codes. Legit LTD does not realize the breach for a day, or a week, and sells those codes to customers. At the same time, the thieves setup a seeming legit web store and started selling their ill gotten codes on that site. Two different customers are looking for Company’s software. One buys a code from Legit LTD. The other buys from thieves seemingly legit store. Just so happens that both stores sold the same code. Now two people have a copy of the same code. Both customers, in this case, believed they were buying a legit code. Both believe their code is valid. Before either can activate those codes, however, Legit LTD realizes they’ve been hacked and tell Company. Company, not knowing exactly which codes were stolen, decides to invalidate the batch… but there are legit customers in the wild that have codes from that batch and there’s no way for Company to tell who bought from who. BOTH customers, at this point, go to activate their code and both are told they’re running a pirated code. Neither of them really pirated, however. The thief did, but the thief isn’t the run using the code.
As such, no… Company and Legit LTD would find it very difficult, if not impossible, to determine who bought legitimately. Most companies, when this happens, would say, fuck’em and let both customers suffer. This company chooses to tell them they’re running suspected pirated codes (though, they don’t know for sure), and, regardless, neither customer would be pirating because both believe they purchased legit codes all above board.
The other possibility of course is the developers themselves seeded keys to display this notice to pirates who might not otherwise purchase the software legitimately. There’s plenty of well-known cases where a developer has released pirated copies/keys into the wild.
Kind of debatable depending on the floor price but not bad an idea either way, it’s all about margins and looking to let yourself understand how much your product is really worth to the customer vs simple market cost
For me sometimes its enough if i can get a plugin demo with FULL functionality and without some sort of beep or white noise every x seconds, to buy a plugin if i like it after tests. And for more then a few days. But this is nice too
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