Reverse Engineering:

[johnnq1]

this one OLD game i want to play loads directly to a long turned-off server. how would i go about learning how to tell the game to search for my local machine? (this is legal, right?)

 

[Markbnj]

Whether it's legal depends on how old, and whether someone still holds a valid copyright and any rights under the EULA that applied when the game was sold. If the game is not sold or published, and there is no technical support for it, then I would have few moral qualms about hacking away at it.

You'll need to look at the config files and other resources that make up the game to begin with. Things like servers may be listed in text or binary formats. If you are trying to build a local server you'll need to get familiar with packet sniffing tools, which is not my area of expertise 🙂.

 

[Ken g6]

I assume that the server is hard-coded. Hopefully, it does a DNS request before trying to connect. You can set your packet sniffer to listen on UDP port 53 to pick up DNS requests. Looks like there are several programs for this, but I've never used any of them.

If the game does do a DNS lookup, and you can find the hostname, you can set that name in your c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file to point to 127.0.0.1. 🙂

If the game instead tries to go straight to an IP address, your task is a lot harder, and you might be out of luck. 🙁 But you might be able to search the executable for a string containing that IP, and change it to "127.0.0.1".

Good luck!

 

[johnnq1]

alright thanks. no the game is definitely not sold and there is 0 support for it.