Ballmerpeak devblog

Software development, related stuff and others

Make it work: GT97 Racing

January 16, 2019 — Richárd Thier

Once I had this game (GT97 Racing) and now found it in nrg image format so I thought it is time to retroplay a bit with it, to find out sadly that the game does not work because of copy protection complains when trying with the NRG, cdemu, linux, dosbox environment.

The game uses CD checking in a way that does not work when the .nrg image is mounted with cdemu on linux and its drive directory is mounted with dosbox!

This is because the CD is a mixed-mode CD with audio tracks and allegedly the length of the tracks are used as copy protection.

The copy protection

The copy protection functions internal logic is structured as follows:

    BEGIN
    AXGET
    MSCDEX-loop
    DELSEG
    CHECKSUM-loop
    AXRET

That is there is some function initialization we do not really care for, then we call a function that returns something in AX register and we push it on the stack to return at the end if it is not "3" for some reason. If it is "3" then we return immediately with "-1" from this point and GOTO AXRET.

Then there is an MSCDEX-loop, that calls INT 2Fh ax=1510 with different param. This is actually done through calling the dos extender first that they use, but whatever. The thing is that this is the MSCDEX driver for CD reading.

Driver function: 03 or 85 Subfunction: 06, 0A, or 0B

This is in a loop and there are a lot of checks in the bottom of the loop, all of which near-jump to a long jump back to the beginning of MSCDEX-loop.

As told you before the AXRET part just pops and returns the AX register and call some random other function in a short loop we do not care for here.

The main "cd check" is however the loop itself as code is never going to get executed after the loop until one puts in the CD. I speculate that some of the calls from this point actually handle different cases like "do we have any CD?" or "how long is the audio track at xyz pos?" and various stuff but I just did not care for the checks as I could find the long-jump where all the checks are collecting up at!

I thought the AX should not become -1 so I made my changes to keep the original behaviour as much as I can, but circumvent the checking codes.

I started to remove the copy potection with the dosbox debugger and runtime modifying the game while it runs in my dosbox build that has enabled debugger with heavy-debugging mode.

Debugging

Removal of copy protection

The easiest way to get around this is to basically change this already unconditional jump into a lot of NOP operations (opcode: 90)

This is an E968FDFFFF -> 9090909090 change in the code here so we always go to the next line which would only happen if the code would reach the part after all the checks cmp and conditional jump operations where a short jump is jumping over the longjump in mention before.

After this, the code deletes whole-segment datas for unknown reasons. I speculated this is for clearing the screen or some buffer, but we just do not care for what it is for.

Then however there is an other "interesting" loop that I called a "CHECKSUM-loop", because it surely calculates some checksum data in the EBX register which it zeroes before the loop. After adding up the checksum, the EBX should become zero once again otherwise we once again get back to the beginning of the so-called MSCEX loop which seems to be some extra check.

To be sure I also removed this extra check by changing an or ebx,ebx into an xor ebx,ebx. I did all these changes while I had the CD mounted in with its data - but not its audio tracks. The data might still be needed! Also the changes mentioned here keep the size of the original executable well which might have been also needed by other tricky checks later - who knows.

After doing these changes runtime in the debugger, the game started up!!!

Working game

In order to create a "no-cd cracked" executable, I screenshot the memory areas nearby the places of the changes so I can use "hiew32" (hackers view) to search and replace the necessary bytes.

Hackers view

The screenshots and some fun pictures are added as fun-facts. As you can see there I also used the old and trusty pen-paper method of debugging the code I got reversed from the game. This is how I got to get grasp of the above mentioned big structure and where the loops are going and things like that! Also you see my hand is on the right windows button instead of the up arrow when I am playing the game: this is because the up arrow does not work anymore so I thought "why not remap the unused right-win button as up?" in linux haha!

Hacking with pen and paper

The executable

Download no-cd crack here

Used tools

  • dosbox built by source with --enable-debug=heavy

  • dosbox debugger (see above point)

  • hiew32 (hackers view)

  • ubuntu 16.04

  • cdemu

  • pen and paper

Useful links

MSCDEX API

Dosbox debugger usage

Hacking with dosbox debugger

Remarks

I have an over 10 year old laptop now where actually the physical CD drive is not even working. It is old, but still fast enough fom development and my coding, also fast enough for browsing with its minimalistly-made ubuntu.

The only heavy part is gaming for which of course this game is not decent if we consider newer titles. This is not a problem as I prefer old good games anyways from times where the gaming industry was different and even big, non-indie titles could risk doing interesting stuff.

Most of the time however making a game run can be as much playful and even more challanging than playing these old games while this serves as a nice programming, hacking and logic excercise and getting to know sysinternals.

In most cases I do a lot of wine, linux and other trickery from which a lot can be learned. This is actually the way how I learned that my VGA configuration was not made properly in my system and I could tweak it, also this is how I have found a completely software EGL / DX8, DX9 dll implementation which actually runs quite fast and reliable for some wine games I could otherwise not run.

It could be that I make a series of blog posts about my musings, just I am not sure if I have the energy to also write down my stuff while doing them on my machine.

The followings were kind of tricky to make run:

  • theocrazy (linux version)
  • rome: total war (only campaign map with software DX)
  • sims 1 (still not works for me, but nearly got it!)
  • gt97 racing
  • tappo 2 (actually this was made much earlier for my friend - softice hack)
  • tie fighter (was too slow on my machine - dosbox config was needed)
  • Nexus the jupiter incident (had bad glitches - need software DX8)
  • Heroes 3: complete (works after some customly made HD-version)
  • Medieval 1: total war (was too slow with wine: tweaks to GPU driver needed)
  • etc.

I do not even remember how many things I actually made to work this way. GT97 was however the first where I had to remove a copy protection by myself. I of course had some reverse engineering and assembly experience, I even did some game cracking back in the days just for fun (age1 and gta2), but now it was part of "making the game run" on my linux machine. The age1 and gta2 were games with already existing no-cd cracks and I actually owned the CDs so it only helped against the need of changing the disk when we did local multi with my bro - however GT97 racing seems like it actually never ever had any no-cd crack made by anyone else. It is at least not found on the net!

It feels nice to be the first, because others were just me recreating an already existing and made no-cd crack just to learn. This was new! :-)

Anyways: Maybe I might post other stuff about how to make ancient games run on linux if these games are actually made for other systems. Also considering my machine is old, I not only make them work on a fast machine, but try to make them work with the least overhead possible so we can enjoy these games even on a mid-range trusty laptop from 2007 on linux!

No-cd cracking of this game took a (whole) afternoon... but it worth it! Please apply this rightfully: buy the game and do this when you want to run it on machines with no CD drives or such stuff! Also use this kind of knowledge only to crack really old (20 years old?) games like me :-).

Prenex

PS.: This is not that big of a feat, but one feels like "Hackerman" :-)

Hackerman

Tags: retro, gaming, dosbox, crack, gtracing, hacking, assembly, debug, hack, linux, cdemu, make-it-work, gt, 97, racing

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