Properly Hacking

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Originally Posted by Theorn For the multiclient address, I disassembled it with IDA Pro. postQuitMessage is the call the client makes when it closes, so I searched for that and traced back the code. I eventually found a statement PUSH 2 that was near references to the TQ_Conquer and English texts. I thought that might be it, so I loaded up conquer.exe in my hex editor and replaced the 02 at that address with a 03 and then I was able to open 3 clients but not 4, then I tried a few other values to confirm. As for the directly patching the conquer.exe to bypass the "please run play.exe", I'd assume it could be done in much the same way as the popup removal, but I haven't tried that yet. I'll post an edit to this message or make a new message once I get a chance to look into it. I have 2 more final exams so I'll be spending my time studying for those instead of poking about abunch of ASM code(Actually one of my finals involves ASM code, but that doesn't count:p).

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Originally Posted by evulhotdog Haha, well its not as easy as he puts it, just because you read it, doesent mean your pro now. A lot of work goes into it trying to find addresses and such (especially debugging). Before you even try to attempt any of these things i suggest you learn the basics of how programs work / are coded, and then go onto the hacking.

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Originally Posted by Theorn Well NULL is just another word for the value zero in programming languages and is different than the text string "NULL", which is 4 characters. So I'd think replacing the address with "NULL" would just be passing the text string "NULL" into the system call instead of the web address. Assembly won't know that the text string "NULL" is supposed to be a zero. I just know that the way I did it, there is no way at all of it opening anything at all when it closes because it won't even try. Anyway, I've just done a few experiemnts. If you replace it with the value 0, then it opens the conquer directory, if you replace it with cmd.exe, it will open a command prompt. If you replace it with the word "pizza", "null", or anything else that is not in any of you system paths, then it will open nothing, but the system call is still done, it just doesn't find the string anywhere in the system path. It works just like the function system() in C++, actually it IS the same function.