How to spoof a hash check?

[lynx]

Looks like like you are on the right track wrt shutting them off, assuming this still works:
[youtube]pkbO5-6CpZY[/youtube]

Additional instructions.

Basically, like it says there, the best current method might just be to get in the habit of starting it from the game .exe rather than the patcher, and just run the patcher when it's really needed.

I have had a similar setup with other games, with two different versions of the shortcut, one for updating and one for playing.

It's also possible that there's a config or .ini you can change, might even be an option to set "show movies" or something to 0, but given it's the company logos, they won't be wanting people to do it, so don't count on finding any such option easily.

As for spoofing hashes, I was thinking of doing that with md5s, once upon a time. The idea was to create something you input a hash string into, and get a string back that'd become the same hash when run through md5, like. Never sorted out the problems with it, but I imagine someone could write something similar that generated files, possibly, which could trick md5-checks, anyways. It was all pretty sketchy, though.

How did you do that?
You can't reverse MD5s.

Although you can't reverse MD5s, the calculation to work them out is pretty simple. As long as you know the calculation (and by definition that is publicly available) it is reasonably easy to create another file that has the same checksum. Even brute force can do it in a short period of time for a small file. Of course, this assumes that the file length is unimportant, that can be the killer for this sort of hack.