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Topic on Talk:The big list of third-party DRM on Steam

Mirh (talkcontribs)

ME1 is reported to be drm free, at least on Steam
Still, one of the thread of the game (monitored with Process Explorer) is called MassEffect.exe!SecuROM, even though it could be even a name leftover

Garrett (talkcontribs)

I checked the Bring Down the Sky installer and it looks like the list entry is correct. The DLC installer applies the regular Patch 1.02 installer which has SecuROM 7 DRM on MassEffect.exe (according to PROTECTiON iD).

I don't have the Steam version of this game to test whether the patch installer successfully replaces Steam's normal executable with this SecuROM one; either way it should be possible to install the DLC, delete MassEffect.exe and then verify the cache to restore Steam's version of MassEffect.exe.

Mirh (talkcontribs)

The patch installers (at least those inside DLCs...) does not replace masseffect.exe. Otherwise the game wouldn't even launch (and I would have noticed d:) But the DLC installers are coded in such a way that if they detect the Steam "flavour" key in the registry, they won't run that
My observation was referring exactly to the original Steam executable. Anyway I checked it with that nice tool (PROTECTiON iD) and it only reports steam protection. So.. I think it's fine.

Even though it's strange that Steam .exe is still 20MB big (whereas in GTA:San Andreas for example, securom removal slimmed down the exe from 15 to 5MB)

Garrett (talkcontribs)

Ah, that makes sense. I've updated the list now.

Mirh (talkcontribs)

Little note
Even though there's no trace of anything other than game files...
Patch installer were (are?) able to install whatever else they wanted. In this case a weird shell extension... :\

Garrett (talkcontribs)

The DLC installer can be extracted manually (I think I used 7-Zip) so the DLC could be installed that way without the bundled patch if needed.

Mirh (talkcontribs)

I know, I used 7-zip too.
What I wanted to point out was that.. I compared 1.01 and 1.01a patch (the latter probably fixed the issue with windows explorer crashing)
But.. the only different file was the game executable (masseffect.exe), which is everything but a shell extension

So there must be something that 7-zip can't see. And this surprised me

Garrett (talkcontribs)

7-Zip doesn't extract installation scripts for some formats (which can contain registry changes etc. applied by the installer) so that's probably where those changes are located.

Special extractors exist for certain installer formats but I don't have the DLC installer downloaded at the moment to check what format it uses and whether its changes can be discovered that way; failing that any registry changes can be captured using regshot.

Mirh (talkcontribs)

That's true, but shell extensions should be tied to a .dll afaik
Patches can be found here anyway