Anyone elses NOCD crack stop working?!

posted on March 2nd, 2009, 3:10 am

First off, I actually DO own a legit copy of Armada II...and Armada I for that matter.  I bought both games when they first came out.  Now my brother and I play FO online and I let him use my CD since he's not as technically oriented as myself.  All of the sudden, for no reason....my FO and Armada II started asking me for a CD.  There have been no changes to my registry that I'm aware of....and trust me...my computer's locked up pretty tight.

So...I uninstalled Armada II and FO, cleaned the registry, etc.  Reinstalled Armada II, updated to 1.1, installed NOCD (a freshly downloaded one in case my old copy became corrupted) and then installed FO and patched it to 3.0.3.  And before anyone says it....yes, I play both so I installed both.  I've since, uninstalled, cleaned registry, etc and tried a ton of different permutations of the process, including just installing FO off the copy of Armada2 I made, then installing the patch then putting both 1.0 and 1.1 NOCD patches.  1.0 crashes the game and 1.1 just says to insert CD.  Anyone have any clue as to what's going on?  I mean, I got a long life out of the Armada II patch.....and since FO 3.0 came out, my brother got me hooked.  Now I'm jonesing to play.  Any ideas?

posted on March 2nd, 2009, 3:25 am

Fo has copy protection. For better or worse.

posted on March 2nd, 2009, 4:50 am

You could try a virtual drive (Daemon software, lite version is free) and a partial CD image, might work better than a nocd patch.  Or, if that doesn't work, you could make a copy of the CD.

posted on March 2nd, 2009, 5:20 am

alcohol 120/52 works as well.

posted on March 2nd, 2009, 6:58 am

crap.  I wanted to avoid doing the virtual drive.  I know how to do it I have always preferred nocd cracks....even for legitimate games.  I've just never had one work and then just "stop" after no patches or anything else.  Oh well....thanks for your advice guys....I'll either fix it or just write a new one.

posted on March 2nd, 2009, 8:17 am

Fo has copy protection. For better or worse.

no, there is no separate copy protection than the one armada 2 has

i'd recommend to try a different nocd crack...

posted on March 2nd, 2009, 9:05 am

i've noticed in vista its starting to detect any nocd crack as an error file and crashes it but cd images still work

posted on March 2nd, 2009, 12:48 pm

Just make an image of your game's CD and use daemon tools. You can than write a quick batch file that auto-mounts your Armada Image when you launch Armada.

posted on March 2nd, 2009, 4:05 pm

Personally, I've found using Daemon lite is much easier than using any kind of NoCD.  Daemon has an auto mount option which will put the image into the drive every time you start up your computer, you can create as many virtual drives as you'd like, and the game runs as if you have a CD in the drive, as opposed to some bugs that nocd cracks can cause.

posted on March 2nd, 2009, 4:29 pm

also some of the no CD cracks are viruses.

posted on March 2nd, 2009, 5:28 pm

I haven't as much as opened my A2 case for more than a year now - a backup copy of the files which I can just copy (if things go wrong ) and a disk image mounted with Daemon tools work just fine.

Very useful too, because it's one less disk to lug around "just in case" I feel like playing

(Actually, not having to use a disk is quieter as well... Noisy slot loading drive is LOUD)