23 May 2011

ResEdit

ResEdit was the first tool I used to ‘crack’ something. I was probably 10-12 years old and wanted to play Descent without having to put the CD in every time. The “DRM” on Descent was pretty lax, it checked for a file on the CD, if it existed it started the game.

ResEdit allowed you to browse through resources of an application graphically and modify them. I was pretty accustomed to modifying apps icons and other silly things. When I opened the game and there was a String called CDCheck and pointed to an obscure file on the CD, I changed it to System/Finder and the game booted up without the CD in! Pwned!

If you had an audio CD in the drive it would play tracks 2-X becuause on the game CD, track 1 was the Data partition (so I didn’t hear the fist song on Weezer’s cd much ;)

ResEdit is still available on Apple’s. ftp://ftp.apple.com/developer/Tool_Chest/Developer_Utilities/ResEdit_2.1.3/ResEdit_2.1.3.sea.hqx

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