The guys from Fairlight have recently started to do some Steamworks CEG releases, and while it's abosolutly fantastic to see them compete with the rest of us, their method simply dosen't justify the effort they put into this.
There are several reasons, but here are the two most interesting ones:
1. CEG Routines are not resolved, instead a part of ceg is emulated to calculate the right values, respect for the research on this, but can lead to false results and slows runtime down.
2. CEG and CRC is still active, can`t run under debugger neither using a "Trainer"
While the second option isn't a reason to proper, it's not living up to the scene rules.
So now we have decided to proper Fairlight's Prototype 2 release, because our crack is fully reversed and CEG free. Which gives the end user a more stable crack, with less crashes, startup problems gone, fast loading, better framerates etc. are some of the problems that our fully reversed crack prevents.
We encourage Fairlight's crackers to run our proper under debugger and set breakpoints on these examples offset's, to see how different kinds of ways CEG get resolved.
10569E10, 10569D70, 1055CF40, 103036F0 and 1010E960
There are of course more, but this will give insight into, why your way of killing the CEG checks with mov,al 1 - just isn't optional for all users, because the CEG does not always gets calculated the same on each machine.
If you still don't get what we mean, then contact us, and we'll help you.
What's even more sad, is that Fairlight got the knowledge to properly reverse the protection and in the end it's actually not that hard to do. So why not do it the quality, tradition and pride way?