"Emulate" GameGuard

**Niklas Schröder** · February 16th, 2008

First off, this isn't another "I can't run my favorite game! Please fix it l33t Linux gurus!" No no. I'm as sick of those threads as the rest of you are.

This thread is meant to answer a few questions many n00bs to Ubuntu (or Linux in general) may have about certain non-functional MMORPG's.

There's an evil thing in this world called GameGuard. It's just an add-on to a game that'll hopefully help prevent hacking from the client. The problem with this is that GameGuard doesn't run at all in Linux and the company that programmed GameGuard isn't planning on porting it. Because it doesn't run, any games that use it won't run.

My question to you "l33t Linux gurus" is whether or not we could find some messy way to "emulate" GameGuard. Throw together some fake .dll files or something. I haven't given it much thought, but shouldn't it be possible with a little effort?

I'm sure if we worked hard enough that we could work out a bounty for the first coder to succeed.

There are PLENTY of Linux users out there who wanna play there favorite MMORPG but can't because of GameGuard. Is there any way we can get around it?

**justin whitaker** · February 16th, 2008

I always operate under the assumption that anything is possible, it's just that the right minds have not been brought to the task.

**Niklas Schröder** · February 16th, 2008

This is how I think about it too. Hence the reason I started this thread.

**WeAreMany** · March 14th, 2008

My Kingdom for a Game Guard Emu!

...bump

**Niklas Schröder** · March 14th, 2008

Lol. This project doesn't much matter to me personally anymore as I am swapping my main machine over to Mac OS X in the near future, but we still do need this for the Linux community.

**kazuya** · June 20th, 2008

Im totally on same page with you guys. I registered with codeweaver just because of this issue with gameguard, etc. The answer was it was potentially harmful to include in codeweaver or WINE. So, a good bypass would have to be something outside of WINE, but could be included or run along with WINE.

some folks bypass the gameguard thing in windows, but i consider that cheating. I just like to be able to by-pass it for mthe sake of being able to run the wonderful MMORPH games on my OS platform of choice, Linux.

I dual boot Windows XP, just for playing that game (2moons)

In reality, if there was a comparable game that was f2p(free to play) like it that runs in Linux, I would switch to that in a heart-beat. Plansecape and wesnoth are great, but not quite the melee type game I am looking for. I admire the fact that it is free and functional.

**cogadh** · June 20th, 2008

There is a way to run some GameGuard protected games in Linux: use a virtual machine running Windows. Of course that only works for games that aren't 3D.

As much as you would like GameGuard to work in Linux, that should not be the goal at all. On Windows, GameGuard is practically a rootkit and has been known to cause numerous system and application problems, including invalidating the Windows Vista license so that Windows Update no longer detects the machine as a valid Windows machine.

The goal instead should be to get game companies to stop using this product to "protect" their software at their customer's expense. There must be a better way to prevent cheating that doesn't install hidden drivers that inject suspect code into running processes (just like a virus), doesn't fail to exit when when the application it protects exits, can be uninstalled by normal means and doesn't potentially break the OS it runs on.

Since GameGuard does all that and more, I for one, don't want it to work on Linux... ever. I don't even want that kind of thing on my Windows machine, that's why I still run anti-virus and anti-spyware in Windows. One of the reasons I use Linux is because I don't have to run those products and it is inherently more secure, why in the world would I want to compromise that security by introducing something like GameGuard into my system?

**William Dojinn** · June 20th, 2008

Add om the fact gameguard DOES NOT PREVENT CHEATING! Sure it makes people work a little harder, but cheating is just as prevelent in games that have little to no proper staffing reguardless on if gameguard is preasent or not.

Gameguard does not work. Its windows-centric, is malware in my eyes, and should never be considered for inclusion by game devs.

Oh and the idea of needing a connection so you can play offline=Fail.