Goodbye Steam Link Filter!

So, if you are like me, you are probably incredibly annoyed by Steam’s new feature, the Link Filter.

I mean, sure, I can install some browser plugin to ‘bypass’ Steam’s landing page, but I still have to wait for like 5 seconds for Steam to perform it’s own checks.
That’s why I decided to make a tool to completely disable link filtering, and make Steam work in the way it used to.

So here it is folks!

This little tool will patch Steam (in-memory) in order to disable the link filter (this also means that you have to run it every time you run Steam).
It’s pretty easy to use. Simply launch it, read through the disclaimer, and let it patch Steam.
It shouldn’t take more than 10 seconds.

This should be completely safe (banning-wise), however until someone from Valve can confirm it, use at your own risk.

Full source code and documentation  is included for the curious folk (or if you don’t trust binary releases)!

Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

July 22, 2014 Randomness, Research, Reverse Engineering

Introducing Outcome!

November 1, 2013 EA, Reverse Engineering

Battlefield 3 – Freecam Roaming in a Paused Scene

Yet again, I fail to realize why DICE decided to remove such features from the retail game.
Makes me sad. :(

March 3, 2013 EA, Emulator Nexus, Research, Reverse Engineering, Venice Unleashed

They don’t want you to know…

All their darkest secrets…

February 28, 2013 EA, Research, Reverse Engineering

Battlefield 3 – Native Spectator Mode – First Preview

Here’s a demonstration of the otherwise hidden spectator mode in Battlefield 3.
I have yet to test player-specific spectating, but when I do I’ll make sure to upload another video.

February 27, 2013 EA, Research, Reverse Engineering

Playing Origin games without Origin

So, if you’re like me, you hate having to wait for Origin to do its weird cloud syncing every time I want to play Battlefield, or maybe you’re tired of it not launching your game due to some weird error.
Perhaps you simply don’t want to have the memory overhead of Origin running, or maybe you simply hate Origin for whatever reason.

Well, recently I was looking around Origin’s DRM (which is what forces games to require Origin to be running) and I came across some nice findings.

Apparently, every recent Origin game that uses the new DRM system (awc.dll or Activation.dll) has a file in the same folder as its binary named <MAIN_EXECUTABLE_NAME>.par.

Obviously, that .par file is encoded and not humanly readable, so I took a closer look and figured out that that file contained several game information, as well as parameters to let know the DRM if the game requires Origin to be running (therefore .par).

So after a lot of peeking and messing around, I present to you my new website.

If you want to play games without origin simply visit my website, upload your .par file and you’ll get a brand new one with Origin disabled.

Simply place it in your game folder, replacing the old one,  and launch your game as you normally would (via Battlelog, by double-clicking the exe, etc.).

Please note that this will make games that require communication with the Origin process (such as SimCity, FIFA 12, etc.) unplayable.

Note: This is in no way a ‘trick’ to play games for free. In order for this to work you need to have a valid license downloaded to your computer for that specific game.

February 6, 2013 EA, Reverse Engineering