Posted February 22, 2024
I've checked out all things Steamless. From what I read, its goal of plucking the DRM out of it does not mean it would come without a convoluted process. Namely, the potential that I have to run an emulator. That would essentially mean swapping what I am already using, which is no solution at all, especially if I can't get that to work. I am not equipped to tackle this on my own (which is why I am even here in the first place). Thus far there is no alternative, especially that I am not seeing suggestions of actual solutions here.
Secondly, there is no "older version" that I can grab at this point. Odds are certain that the DRM has been there since Day Zero. The DRM on this particualr game is a primitive iteration of SteamStub when the game was published through Steam. There's no point in wasting all that effort that is not going to work.
Otherwise, if you do not know of how to get this to work, and you're still gonna suggest purchasing things on principle when I may be facing the same problems, refrain from making any sort of feedback. It's not a solution.
I closed Steam, started the Exe and Steam did open.
On a very well known Webpage is a No CD Patch from 2006 for 1.2.
So i downloaded it and threw it into the Folder, now the Game starts without Steam.
This should make the Game startable on XP, as it does not longer need Steam.
Just exchange the Exe.
Boy, that was easy. It was that all along.
I got my file from a different site, but I don't think there's a difference. The only eception being it's twice the EXE is twice the file size somehow. That is negligible.
But yes, all digital distributions are patched to v1.2. The manual patches are more geared to the physical copies.
I'd been wondering if I could have noCD'd the way I did for another game when I actually had a physical copy of another game. This alternatively suffices and that's all I care about.
Thank you!