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Comment by HeYmaney | Hacker News Reader

I was around 10 the first time I played RCT. A friend of mine brought me a copy disk of his original one. I could install the game but not play since there was a protection against copied CDs with an error message. In a desperate attempt, I bruteforced the exe by clicking 50 times on it and suddenly the game magically started. I was so happy I started a dance of the joy and would then use this trick to play the game.

To this day I still don't know how it was possible to bypass the protection.

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RCT1 No-CD is as easy as editing a Registry key actually.

— Install the base game and both expansions normally.

— Copy and merge the `ObjData` and `Data` folders from the CDs directly into the install folder.

— Open RegEdit, navigate to `HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Fish Technology Group\Rollercoaster Tycoon Setup`, and change `Path` and `SetupPath` to the path to your install folder.

Source: Did this just a couple months ago on my HITACHI FLORA 270HX.

When playing The Sims as a kid, there were loads of expansions, but you only needed the last one in the chain you had installed to play. So if I had 1 and 2, and a friend 3 and 4, I could buy 5 and then borrow my friends disks and install those.

Or if it was a game for a LAN, just boot the game with the CD in, then pass the CD along for others to do the same.

Co-op mode piracy

how's a 10 year old supposed to know that

They aren't, it's in response to the final line of curiosity to this day.

Mostly this, but also 10 is old enough to find GameCopyWorld https://web.archive.org/web/*/gamecopyworld.com

Source: was once 10

I have no idea, but thats cool :-D

Could have been some sort of Race Condition maybe, which is more likely on an older resource constrained system?

Maybe if the copy protection process became unavailable, the game loaded anyway as a way of providing a better user experience?

I'm probably being too generous there LOL

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