Nimrod

A few of pointers for all posters to understand:

Posting saying I need a crack or please tell me how to make it work isnt helpful. We know it doesnt work right now, it says that right next to the download link! Its just filling up this thread with rubbish and making it difficult for those who are working on finding a working crack from doing so. I know myself I've had to go through so many posts, some of them to official patches which BLOCKS the lan play cracks which really isnt helping the effort.

Please read whats already been posted, we dont need four people linking to the same crack, one link will do and everyone give feedback based on that.

For those of you who are taking part in the effort to find a working solution, when posting links to downloads may I recommend attaching them to your posts? We have no problem with them on this site and attachments can be downloaded by guests (non-registered users). That way people dont have to waste time with horrible download sites like megaupload and rapidshare which have limits to non-paying members and are full of horrible adverts and waiting times.

Lets focus on the one important goal, EA released patch v1.1 which "BLOCKED" lan play from being enabled via a crack. Which means it is possible.

The RA3 beta download link I posted at the start is for version v1.0 which is before they blocked lan play cracks. Therefore we must focus on efforts to find a working crack, then we can post a walkthrough for installing and setting up so that everyone, even less-technical people can easily experience RA3 via LAN play.

Thank you all for your time and help, we will figure this out working togeather!

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Wangyuan01

YouTube - Unlocked Red Alert 3 Beta Client

Here the one Unlocked the Red Alert3 beta Client, Who can just do it ?
I was bored so I desided to search for the LAN-mode in the Red Alert 3 Beta but what I found was more than that.

I was able to unlock the complete mainmenu of the game: tutorial, network, skirmish, campaign, replay browser and credits. Some of them don't work e.g. like tutorial or campaign because the data that would be necessary is not included in the beta the others work as they intended to work.


Some facts for you to stop asking me the same questions over and over again:

- I have not modified the gameengine or any data and/or files related to it.
- I have not removed securom or any other kind of copyprotection!
- I have not hacked the installer to install eighter without a serial or with an invalid one. (I DO have a valid beta registration key!!!)
- I do not and will not post any links for illegally downloading the beta client. Every link posted in the comments will be deleted!
- It was just a proof-of-concept. I will release a detailed tutorial which containes every step I did to unlock the beta client as well as a small application capable of doing all the steps automatically. This application is for testing-purposes ONLY! You use it at your own risk.

wg3bfu

@Wangyuan01:
Thank you, Wangyuan01! We are eagerly awaiting your tutorial and application.
I'm very interested in how you have done it!

Assassin

Yes, very nice job there Wangyuan01!
I think the amount of levels is nearly the same as in C&C3 btw. Remember the Scrin only had like 4 levels.

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InsaneNutter

Despite warnings by Nimrod I have had to remove a few posts, we are not a strict community however we do need to take action when links to torjans are posted. I have also taken the opportunity to clean this thread up so it easy for people to find the relevant information posted. We have some very good information posted here and it looks like progress is slowly been made, as previously posted by Nimrod it doesn’t help when people are constantly re posting the same post.

If your post was removed it’s nothing personal, this thread was getting a bit out of hand.

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gailo

I think I have a way around the CD check at launch but its not really workble at a large scale.

I used Wireshark to check what RA3 does when you launch the game and found that it was connecting via HTTPS to https://proxy.novafusion.ea.com/. I modified my HOSTS file to point to my local webserver and launched the game again hoping that if it got no response it'd carry on but sadly no. However I checked my logs and found this;
I wrote a little script to mimic that request and got this in response;
I'm pretty sure that if you can find out what the response normally is with a valid key then you could make a server that always gives a response saying the key is correct allowing people into the game.

wg3bfu

@gailo:
Could you post a step by step guide what someone with a valid key would have to do. (I don't have one.)

wg3bfu

Can you decrypt (SSL) the messages with the sniffer?

I think you would have to do something like that:

* start a local web server
* edit the file "hosts" to point proxy.novafusion.ea.com to local webserver
* start red alert 3 beta with valid key
* look into web server log to find the POST message used for validation
* undo changes in "hosts" and use script to send message manually to EA's web server
* copy and paste the web server response here in the forums

Thanks, gailo & deoton! Please correct me if I'm wrong!

gailo

You're pretty much spot on with what I did.

• Install xampp webserver
• Open C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\HOSTS with notepad
• Add the following line "127.0.0.1 proxy.novafusion.ea.com"
• Start RA3 and wait for it to close
• Open the log file for the webserver "C:\xampp\apache\logs\ssl_request.log&quot ;
• Remove the line from HOSTS file added earlier
• Send the same response that the game sent to the server. I used the blelow Greasemonkey script for Firefox as it was quick to write but there's millions of way's to do this.

This pretty much all you'd have to do to get the required response from the server whiich then could be faked using our own server. The problem lies in this possibly not being the only CD check performed and may require more work but it's something that can only be discovered over time. The other possibility is to modify the file that's accessing the server and tell it to connect to the unencrypted http://proxy.novafusion.ea.com rather than the encrypted https://proxy.novafusion.ea.com as either will work. EDIT :: I love being right I used a HexEditor on paul.dll found in \RetailExe\1.0\ and cahnged the https:// into http:// and I was able to sniff the traffic with Wireshark.

cyrilthebest8

So you think that you can get the reponce for a real CD key? And then use it on a "emulated" server?