The worst anti-cheat: GameGuard

Phantasy Star Online 2: The GameGuarding

Update (04/05/2016): It seems that most of the issues don’t occur anymore. It has been like that for a month or two. While I doubt about how effective it is, I know that there are mods that can hook into the game so maybe GameGuard is just being more tolerant on our systems.

GameGuard is often bundled with Free 2 Play games especially when they’re Asian games. But it’s trash.

I play Phantasy Star Online 2 and it’s bundled with it.

What is GameGuard?

GameGuard is produced by nProtect and is supposed to be one of many anti-cheat software.

Its main job is to hide the game’s process. It seems to make sure that some DLL don’t get loaded by the game or any other app.

The issues I experienced

I have experienced a few issues, some have had me reinstall my system and some have just given me headaches.

The issues I had were generally:

  1. No process can be spawned (start menu, desktop icon, run prompt);
  2. No console, such as cmd.exe or cygwin, can be opened;
  3. No process in cygwin can be spawned (could not fork);
  4. GameGuard does not end when the game is closed and I can’t restart the game because GameGuard doesn’t want me to spawn another GameGuard;
  5. Google Chrome doesn’t work;
  6. Can’t reboot (can’t spawn shutdown.exe ?);
  7. My DNS breaking and not accepting domains I don’t have in cache;
  8. Some software will crash when started:
    • Google Chrome;
    • Media Player Classic (CCCP);
    • hexchat.

The list goes on.

Mailing the support

I once contacted the nProtect’s support because my issue was going nowhere. This was the mail I sent:

To: support@nprotect.com
Subject: Issue with GameGuard not closing after game ends

Hi,

I’m currently having an issue with GameGuard for Phantasy Star Online 2 (PSO2). Everytime I play PSO2 and finish I must reboot my computer (sometimes do a hard reboot) because the “GameMon64.des” process does end when the game is closed.

I know it doesn’t end because when I relaunch the game, the new “GameMon64.des” process that was spawned doesn’t hide the game’s or GameGuard’s process and is the only process to not end once I’m greeted with a “np1002” error.

If I try to kill the process I’m notified that I don’t have the required permissions for that (which I do have since I have admin powers).

I have tried deleting the whole GameGuard folder everytime I launch the game and nothing changed.

I’m running Windows 8.1 64bit and Kaspersky.

What can I do to not have anymore issues ?

Thanks.

I never got a response but after a while the issue was gone.

Conclusion

I hate GameGuard, it doesn’t stop cheating and people can still inject DLLs anyway so what’s the point?

I’ll still use it because I have no choice if I want to play PSO2.

Playing Star Wars: Battlefront 2 online

SW_BF2-header

With the new Star Wars Battlefront being teased and disappointing people, you can still play the old Battlefront 2 online even without GameSpy.

The easy steps

  • Go to the download page;
  • Download the corresponding archive, “BattlefrontII_1.1_europe_clientfiles_english.zip” was the one I downloaded for me;
  • Extract it to the game folder “\Steam\SteamApps\common\Star Wars Battlefront II\GameData”;
  • In-game: create an account like if it was a GameSpy one;
  • Execute order 66.

Source: http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Battlefront_2

Upgrading Android on a rooted Nexus 4 without wiping

Nexus Root Toolkit

If you’re running Android 5 Lollipop and you have rooted it you may fail to update whenever an OTA update is available.

Nexus Root Toolkit

The Nexus Root Toolkit is the best tool you will ever need for your Nexus device.

This great piece of software will simplify anything you want to do such as:

  • Flashing a bootloader or a ROM;
  • Making a backup of your device;
  • Fixing bootloop and bricks;
  • Make tea, pour and stir it.

Flashing the updated stock ROM

In my case I’m running the stock ROM of Android 5 Lollipop since I’m mad at Cancérigènemod Cyanogenmod for failing at making my phone work as a phone.

disclaimer: I’m not responsible for any of your actions in case something goes wrong.

To update without wiping or resetting the device to factory settings you can follow these easy steps:

  • Enable USB debugging in your dev settings;
  • Connect your device to your computer;
  • In the Nexus Root Toolkit you must select “Flash Stock + Unroot” with “Device is on/Normal” selected;
  • Select “Automatically download”;
  • Tick “No wipe”;
  • Tick “Force Flash”;
  • UnTick “Post-Flash Factory”;
  • Then follow the instructions.

Source: http://redd.it/37dxt3

Can’t attach files in GMail with Firefox

UPDATE 2020/03/04: This issue is no longer relevant, ignore this post.

So recently I needed to attach several files in mails to send, while Google Drive is great for large files I felt that I shouldn’t have to use Google Drive for a few PDFs.

  • In Firefox type about:config in the address bar;
  • Click the button stating you’ll be careful;
  • Search for network.http.spdy.enabled and toggle it to false;
  • Try attaching files in GMail.

There a several reasons I prefer Firefox over Google Chrome right now so this fix was needed.

Show Me Your Gists

UPDATE 2021/03/04: After reviewing some posts (like this one) I’ve come to the conclusion that this is a pretty dumb idea, don’t use it. Instead use Enlighter.

Update 17/02/2016: Looks like I had to change some CSS again.

Update 12/05/2015: It seems that some themes don’t work well with this plugin. The I recommend the default Twenty Eleven WordPress theme if you need to use this plugin. If you have a fix for other themes don’t hesitate to send a pull request.

As a hot fix you can add the following CSS rule:

.gist .blob-num {
	width: 35px !important;
}

Show Me Your Gists is a simple plugin I wrote to embed Gists links as widgets.

Imagine you want to directly embed this link: https://gist.github.com/SenpaiSilver/0f775a6dac4807c4e97a

Imagine that you can do it just like you embed a YouTube video by pasting a link on a line by itself. Now you can and this is what it looks like.

https://gist.github.com/SenpaiSilver/0f775a6dac4807c4e97a

SMYG is all about easy embedding without even needing to copy and paste the embed link and going out of the visual view to write some HTML.

Brackets

UPDATE 2021/03/04: After reviewing some posts (like this one) I’ve come to the conclusion that Adobe Brackets was ahead of its time, now I’m a VSCode guy.

Brackets is a modern editor that is really great for web design as it updates you page in a live view without having to Alt-Tab out of your editor.

As for any editor it is possible to write any languages in it and even enhance the experience with plug-ins. All the plug-ins can be downloaded in the Extension Manager built-in.

Continue reading Brackets

Python web development with Flask

flask

Flask is a microframework for Python for web development. It’s BSD licensed and is really easy to use for a personnal web project or even for scalable apps for Heroku.
It requires at least Python 3.3, so if you’re running Debian 7 “wheezy” at the time of writing then you might run into problems.

To setup Flask run this command as root:

# pip install Flask

If you’re missing pip and you are on Windows you should get the lastest version that includes pip.
Then to test if everything went well, you will need to run a script such as this one:

from flask import Flask
app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route("/")
def hello():
    return ("Hello World!")

if (__name__ == "__main__"):
    app.run()

Run it as a simple Python script and you should be greeted with a message saying that it’s running:

* Running on http://localhost:5000/

Now you can start your first webapp by reading the documentation.
If you’re serving web pages with Apache 2, you might want to read this.