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Comment by aasasd | Hacker News Reader

Gotta say, I would just pirate the game and play it with a vaguely clear conscience since I've already paid for it. Probably would block it in the firewall, though.

I think my approach may well be completely lawful in some jurisdictions, since it essentially amounts to ‘making the purchased software compatible with the user's device’.

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No need to pirate the game. It can be legally bought without any DRM (nor the “game not found” issue) over at GOG:

https://www.gog.com/game/heroes_of_might_and_magic_5_bundle

Actually, general consensus is that HOMM3 is the best of the Heroes of Might and Magic games:

https://www.gog.com/game/heroes_of_might_and_magic_3_complet...

Even though HOMM3 is from the 20th century, there are still fan made expansions updating the game here in the 2020s, e.g. https://h3hota.com/

Oh man, thanks for that, HoMMIII is one of my favorite games!

For disc versions or botched official releases gamecopyworld still seems to be there. Back when games still came on discs, i downloaded the crack even before trying to install a freshly bought game.

Ofc, this is mostly a moot point now with GoG. If GoG manages to convince the publisher to let them sell the game without DRM.

Edit @stavros: You and anyone suffering from nostalgia should check GoG regularly :) I probably have most of my childhood games on there now.

There's even active HoMM3 PvP streamer community with several thousands live audience on Youtube and Twitch. There are also addons, and community, for Heroes 4 and 5, but two magnitudes smaller.

Wait what? Wow Heroes 3 is a childhood game of mine. I remember spending hours in the map editor just drawing maps and placing enemies and resources all around.

Glad to see it still alive and kicking! Who to watch?

https://m.twitch.tv/directory/game/Heroes%20of%20Might%20and... and then it will depend on your language preference

Also https://www.youtube.com/user/Chris67132/videos

My favorite player by far:

https://www.twitch.tv/theknownworld - mostly weekly streams

https://www.youtube.com/user/TheKnownWorld - some informational videos (strategies and such) as well as challenges against computers. Great explanations on the why/how and you get to watch at your own pace. I enjoy these more than the streams. Unfortunately he has run out of challenge ideas I think hehe

HOMM 2 and HOMM3 were probably the most underrated games of the 90s

These games stood their own even in the age of Warcraft 2.

I nmhave yet to see a friend that, after being shown how to play the game, would not be totally hooked on HOMM2-3.

To this day, the only (old) game several friends will randomly want to boot are the HOMM series.

Would blocking in firewall prevent it to install trojans? I thought once something is running it's too late.

And that's why you install questionable software in a virtual machine that you absolutely monitor with every available tool under the moon first. See where it goes, what it exports and brings back, check for file modifications it does with a file monitoring or file difference tool. Also repeat this test 365 times, one for each day of the year - pretty sure automation comes to mind. And only then you can say with a 50% error margin that the thing you downloaded is safe :P

I just use Sandboxie instead.

Actually the various torrent aggregators usually have a comment section and if you don't download 0-days it's already vouched safe/unsafe by the time you get to it.

I believe that’s not against trojans, but for the legal safety (the game can’t call home and tell its/yours ids). As of trojans, just use well-established, curated torrent forums instead of faceless rarbg/kat/pb alikes.

Still risky. Any piracy of mine stopped once I had enough disposable income (and Steam etc. came along) to more conveniently buy the game. Which is an interesting commentary on the supposed lost sale for every pirate copy: when I couldn't afford it, there was no potential sale actually lost. I certainly understand budget-driven piracy though.

Anyway, if you're running pirate copies of any variety, I'd recommend a sandbox of some sort. VMware Player is free, and in my experience faster than VirtualBox. It won't passthrough a dedicated GPU though so it would only be good for older games. you'd need Workstation Pro to get that. Or a Linux distro like Proxmox that runs a bare-metal hypervisor.

Honestly, I don't know any well-established and curated forums (except for rutracker, but that's Russian, and mostly movies and music).

I, ahem, heard that Rutracker also has games, and that it's pretty alright about marking content in English.

Plus there's Google Translate for when the posts aren't that easy to grok.

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