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[ Space Cadet Pinball Highscore Crack ] - Download

3D Space Cadet PInball Crack

Disclaimer: This article talks about editing the registry. Be very careful of changing the registry, as it could really shag your computer good if you change something you shouldn't. You do so at your own risk and I hold no responsibility in any sense whatsoever if you bugger something.

As you may or may not know, there is a little application I wrote and posted on the site that allows you to view and edit the 3D Space Cadet Pinball game hi-score table. A long time ago, a friend at school asked me if I could do it, but I never got round to it. Well Nick, here it is and how it works.

It's very simple, and all done through the registry. If you fire up regedit and navigate to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Plus!\Pinball\SpaceCadet key (if you don't have it, make sure you've run the game at least once before) and you'll see lots of values. Among which are 11 that we are interested in - the 5 x.Name/x.Score pairs, and Verification. You'll notice that each Name and Score pair contains the current high score data. If a particular position has not been filled yet, the name will be blank and the score will be -999. You can try editing these values directly, but if you fire up the pinball game and check the scores you'll see that despite your efforts, Microsoft's programmers have sussed you - the table will be blank! This is where the last value, "Verification" comes into play. This is a numeric code that, naturally, verifies that the hi-scores are correct and valid. Every time that the game writes the hi-score table, it recalculates this code. So, when you edited the scores manually and didn't update the verification value, the game knows that you've been cheating because the code doesn't match the score data. It follows then, that to crack the scores, you need to figure out how the verification code works, and it's much more straightforward than you might think.

First, take the values in each of the Score values and sum them. Then, for each of the Name values, take each character and convert that character to it's decimal ASCII code. Sum each of the ASCII codes for each Name and add the total to the sum of the Score values. This is your verification code. Edit the Verification value and you've cracked it. Fire up the pinball game and marvel at your handiwork. Now, unless you're 1337, it might be a little time consuming to work out the verification code, which is why I wrote the cracker app - to do it all for you! It takes care of reading the current scores, working out your new verification code and then writing the info back to the registry.

A couple of notes for running the program:

Download the pinball cracker here. If you use it, I'd appreciate any comments - leave me a message in the guestbook. Cheers!