Heroes of Might and Magic V – Hammers of Bait and Switch

Ubisoft changed the reg key of the base game from it's retail key to "Uplay Install 87" and the expansion had no idea to look for that key at all. If you used the Ubisoft copy of both games, the expansion pack would never have found the base game.

I do remember trying to mod Populous the Beginning, which is quite a bit older

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/

I could have also just pirated it. If I gave up, that's how we'd have done it.

That said, if we'd have done that, I wouldn't have had the fun ripping this piece of software to bits. :)

It's worth doing at least once for anyone, but I think it will get harder for people as more content ends up ephemeral, unsearchable, or locked inside walled gardens.

How so? I'm very much so a nascent programmer, but I've learned the most by decompiling other's code and seeing what works and what doesn't. When I see good apps, I guess I make the (sometimes specious) assumption that whoever wrote it likely also knows how to write pretty well.

I've also done a ton of troubleshooting at a past support position via decompiler since the Dev Team was sometimes...sparse with details :)

It's one of the things I do like about programming, it's just a big logic puzzle to break down. Sometimes the logic harder to follow, but there is a way to understand it. My biggest mental growths have been just seeing how other people accomplish goals I want to accomplish, and understanding what does and doesn't work well. Especially with major developers, it's really interesting to see how/why they do the things they do as their needs are way different than in-house app needs.

The two together along with my memory and the order of open tabs is enough to put together "good enough" documentation showing the discovery and fixing process.

Once done, and feel like I can write a blog about it, I would redo the whole thing (and take the screenshots) for the blog article.

I started trying to fix it on a Friday evening and gave up after I couldn't get the "abort -> No Operation" thing. When I came back a couple of days later, I realised how I was going to proceed, but wanted to write it up. I made sure the thread I was pulling made sense (and thus I was confident I'd get to the end of this), stopped, and wrote the writeup to that point retrospectively. I also went back and recreated some of the screenshots.

From then on I played with the software for a bit until I "hit a breakthrough", stopped, and wrote the story and took some screenshots, then worked on the software until the next "breakthrough". I wanted this doc to record offsets and methodology so I made sure to include that wherever I could. I also used the document as a "rubber-duck debugging" aide, writing it for someone unfamiliar to the project.

I then polished/edited it (rushedly, without too much care) the day after and put it up. You can see my shift in methodology a few times where I mess up the past and present tense and with how some bits have considerably more detail than others.

As this is my first, I don't know if I'd do it the same way again. I've got a HW hacking project on the go and while I've taken loads of pictures, I think I'll probably be writing that up fully retrospectively.

Ubisoft changed the reg key of the base game from it's retail key to "Uplay Install 87" and the expansion had no idea to look for that key at all. If you used the Ubisoft copy of both games, the expansion pack would never have found the base game.

I also think that if the author here used that in the first place they would have arrived at the registry problems much sooner. ProcMon is often the first thing I reach for when dealing with a 'missing files' kind of problem on Windows.

And there is "strace" (not the one from cygwin/mingw, which mostly traces apps written for their runtime), but from DrMemory's - https://drmemory.org/page_drstrace.html

Then you have the realtively recent Detours released, and tons of other tooling TBH, just all over.