~ overflow ~

Everyone who download warez know how hard is to keep those damn dual layer isos, apart from that this game has 3 disks, meaning you need to keep it rared on 4 regular dvd5s, you will also need 40GB hdd space, 20gb to uncompress and other 20gb to install, apart from that you will need some extra space if you patch it, like 4gb.

So while installing this game for several hours you might be thinking that if you actually bought it the install process would be more smooth, FAIL! While i was installing it i found lots of “owners” complaining about it on forums, apparently, the patch ascaron developed uses a lame md5 check – why lame? you ask – imagine md5 check 20gb of data? that would take a hell of time right? now do that * 6, and you get how long it will be to patch the game – the installer do a md5 check on all files before and after patching, and there are 3 different patches (at least so far). The patch takes so long that you may feel that your computer is stuck or that the patch is bad, however, DON’T close it or brute force close it (like i did), this will corrupt the files and you will have to REINSTALL it from zero, meaning several hours of suffering. I suggest you to get FileMon from sysinternals to monitor the patching process.

Apart from that, the third dvd, the elite graphics one, seems to have a bad installer, they forgot to build it right, it checks the disk space on the %SystemDrive% wich means that, if you have windows on a partittion/drive (C:) and games on another (D:) you will need 7GB of space free to install this thing (even if the space isen’t used at all) — because i felt on this painfull issue (after installing the game twice) i had to brutalize the installer, because it’s so crappy that i can’t stand it.

There is a setup.ini file wich got all the variables for install shield follow, you just need to change the one that says:

DiskSpace=8000    ;DiskSpace requirement in KB

to something more cool, like:

DiskSpace=8    ;DiskSpace requirement in KB

but WAIT, you can’t edit a setup.ini into a emulated .iso file, so you need to uncompress the .iso — what this means??? — lots of time uncompressing plus if you want to rebuild the image with the hacked setup.ini you will have lots of suffering ahead; My first thought was edit the setup.ini and save it with WinISO so i can update the .iso file and all good, however WinISO can’t take this incredibly big files (dvd3 iso file is 7.27GB), so i tried MagicISO which also didn’t worked — oh no surprise — so the best thing to do is uncompress this shit and pray that it works. Uncompressing the iso will require ~7.3GB, elite graphics will eat up the same size on the install, so this means 40gb+(7.3*2)=54.6GB needed, but that’s so far, i haven’t applied the patches yet.

—- 2pm

So after 30 minutes uncompressing, i realized that the setup.ini hack didn’t worked, it just got ignorated, so i found on a forum that you can make it work on a different way, running setup by “setup.exe /a” i was able to choose where i wanted to have it installed, even not being perfect it worked, i just had to move some files to the right pak folder and delete some useless files.

Also, as i figured before, the patch uses the TMP variable to determine what folder it will use for the temp files, which means, that again, if you have your temp files on your windows drive you will need 7gb of free space there, or you could just change the var by Windows + Pause -> Advanced -> Variables -> edit TMP , TEMP for global and your user.

—- 4pm

After several hours installing, the patch got the same locking issue, as FileMon stated i got lots of “INSSUFICIENT RESOUCES” errors, couldn’t be the disk space neither the memory, so i’m guessing that this patch is bugged, it wasn’t even reading any data, just stuck on a loop. I’m downloading the full patch 2.0.2 -> 2.34 now. I also noticed that the patch is totally idiotic, it changes the CurrentVersion at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Ascaron Entertainment\Sacred 2 before even finishing installing wich means that if you fail patching you will need to reinstall the whole fucking thing again, so i decided to ignore this and just change the CurrentVersion key to 2.0.2.0 hehehe

—- 6pm

The full patch didn’t even started , don’t know if it’s because of the registry hack but it just sucked, i’m going to reinstall for the third time, but now i’m going to do a scandisk and defrag before. This is getting ridiculous.

—- 9pm

After the full reinstall and scandisk i applied the full patch, it took several minutes to open, this makes you think that it’s stuck or bugged or even corrupt since the .exe file got that typical corrupt icon, but in the end it patched (took like 30 mins due file checks) and then after the defrag i was able to play the pirated using a japanese loader. So far so good!