Chuzzle Deluxe from PopCap

Usually I do not play games in computer, I don’t get that much interest on it actually. I have seen many of my friends to pass day after day in front of computers just playing puzzle games. It’s not that I never tried, I tried but failed every time. I can not keep patience playing game, although I loved to develop games in my student life.

Anyway, few days ago as a part of an assignment I had to test a game just for 30 minutes. Within 30 minutes I had to understand it, play it and report the bugs that I find. Finally I could report only one bug, that is not important. The important thing is, I got interest about that game; not for playing it more and more but to crack it. The name of the game was Chuzzle Deluxe which is really an interesting puzzle game from PopCap. The problem is you will have to buy it to play for unlimited time. As because the free version of this game allows only 30 minutes to play.

However, after finishing my assignment I played with this a bit more just to see how strong their protection is regarding 30 minutes play time. Finally I could not make this for unlimited time period but able to increase it 45 minutes, 60 minutes and so on. Here is the trick:

1. After downloading the free version 1.0 Rev. 4075 Build 183, install it any location in your PC. e.g. C:\Program Files\Chuzzle Deluxe\
2. Before playing the game, just keep a back up of C:\Program Files\Chuzzle Deluxe\ReflexiveArcade\RAW_004.wdt of this file, we will use it in future.
3. Now start the game, you will see a message like “30 minutes of 30 minutes remaining”.
4. Be ready to do the first hack. Go to your registry editor then navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ReflexiveArcade and see there is a key ‘TrialTestGroup’. The default value of this key is 1 which means you will be able to play maximum 30 minutes. If you just make it 0 (zero), you will then be able to play for 45 minutes. And the value 2 is for 60 minutes. Try this before playing the game. Change the value and re-run the game and see the affect.
5. Assuming that you have successfully able to increase the time limit from 30 minutes to 60 minutes. Now play the game for few minutes e.g. 5 minutes. Now the message is like, 55 minutes of 60 minutes remaining. In this way if you play the game for the rest of the 55 minutes, the ‘Play Game’ button will be hidden as a result it cannot be played again until buy it.
6. Be ready to do the second hack. Go to your registry editor then navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ ReflexiveArcade\[GAME_ID] and see there is a key ‘Progress’. Delete this key.
7. Remember I said to keep a copy of ‘RAW_004.wdt’. Now, replace the existing one (C:\Program Files\Chuzzle Deluxe\ReflexiveArcade\RAW_004.wdt) with the one you kept. That’s all, keep playing forever without buying it.

Note: If you don’t do the above hassle then just reinstall the game in another folder. You will get another 30 minutes every time.

According to the Noah’s documentation Enabling Permalinks from ‘Control Panel > Settings’ should not work in free/lite version. This feature is only available in their licensed version. But actually not. You can easily bypass this protection just changing a line of code in the app\settings.php file.

Look at the function ‘permaLinksEnabled()’, you will see a line like:

return class_exists(“rss”) && !empty($this->enablePermalinks);

Replace the line with:

return !empty($this->enablePermalinks);

That’s all. Now login as a admin then go to ‘Control Panel > Settings’. There you will find a checkbox ‘Enable permalinks’, check it.

By the way, if you are developing in windows with XAMPP you may find the permalink is not working. This is because, the default installation of xampp has a bit of lacking of enabling mod rewrite. To enable mod rewrite in XAMPP you will have to follow the following procedures and then restart the apache.

1. Go to the directory of installation <xampp-directory>\apache\conf and edit httpd.conf. Find the line which contains:
‘#LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so’

2. Uncomment the above line

3.  Also find ‘AllowOverride None’ make it ‘AllowOverride All’. You may find it appears  2 or 3 times on the configuration file. Change everywhere.