[Scummvm-devel] Detecting patched games

[Max Horn]

Am 15.08.2010 um 10:58 schrieb Bertrand Augereau:

> I agree with your stance, there.

I don't quite agree with it (for reference, Betrand was referring to Oystein's position that users may have legitimately applied a crack). The example seems rather contrived to me. Oystein, Betrand, do you have any *concrete* example of a ScummVM supported game that you have patched yourself, for reasons as outlined in Oystein's mail? Note also that we legally bypass copy protection for some games in the engine, instead of patching game data; and also note that many "patches" that are meant to bypass copy protection are buggy and cause issues in the games at other points. 

Anyway, in the end, we are moving in a very grey area here. So no matter what we do, we will leave some people unhappy... There is no perfect solution, I am afraid. As it is, though, I think the people who really want to hack their game copies manually are few far and between; and people who can do that certainly can recompile ScummVM with the MD5 of their custom game data inserted, can't they?

> 
> Anyway somebody with a compiler and a svn client will probably ship builds that accept pirated games, don't you think?  

Indeed; and this would be even easier than ever before, as they would only need to remove that "pirated" flag (resp. the code that checks for it). This is IMHO a major drawback of the "include MD5 to be able to notify users about piracy" idea.

But again, there just is no perfect solution ... Hrm... 

Bye,
Max