CD keys

General Discussion General Discussion Technical Discussion
1

problems with

damn it i can’t load hw2!!!

i had problems with homeworld 1 so i uninstalled it and reinstalled it downloaded the version1.05 patch and rebooted and somehow i’ve lost all my hw2 software files.

so i go to reinstall the game to find that the CD key is required and that i can’t find it anywhere!!!

it sucks!!!

help anyone???

please…

:frowning:

HELP!!!

2

Well, your best bet would be find your CD key… I tend to keep a few copies of my keys around to avoid problems like this :stuck_out_tongue: I should note that it’s almost impossible for an installation of one to affect the other though… even if you installed them both to the same directory, they shouldn’t interfere with each other (I just checked my installs for reference… the filenames and directory structure are entirely disjoint). Double check to make sure that it’s actually gone.

Failing that, you’re going to need your original CD key so you can play online… it’s in your registry, but it’s encrypted. This isn’t as bad as it sounds though. Just find the key string in the registry and copy the whole encrypted string and save it somewhere (in fact, save it in a few places). Then you can just cough borrow cough another key to install, and copy the old key back in to the registry. This should let you play online using your original CD key, even though you can’t find it

If you can’t find the key in the registry… well, then somebody has obviously has uninstalled HW2 on that computer, and you really do need to find your key. :stuck_out_tongue:

3

Yea Kaskara has this one covered,good work.

4

thanks kaskara

thogh is there any way of gettining it off the cd through decryption of the dll files on the cd?

5

I doubt it. The CD key isn’t actually stored on the CD anywhere… this is why you can install it using other keys. There’s just an algorithm somewhere that verifies if the key is good. Looking at those key verification algorithms is how certain-pieces-of-illegal-software (who’s name you can probably guess) get created… it’s not impossible to do, but it is difficult.

It is for exactly this reason that I wish Sierra would sell extra keys online for say… $5. Essentially free money for them, and definitely worth it for those of us that want a legitimate key when we’ve lost ours.

6

thanks kaskara looks like im screwed and im gonna need a new copy of the game

7

Zero had one of those for HW1.