Halo CE 1.09: Dedicated Server Patcher
Posted by BrandiniMP in Updates on January 12th, 2010
Due to popular demand, i have written a new patcher, this supports Halo CE 1.09, 1.08, 1.07 and 1.00 and can convert between those versions (1.09 exe -> 1.00 compat).
Download:
File: HCEPatcher.zip
Size: 216 KB
Tool: Windows Live Messenger Now Playing Forcer
Posted by BrandiniMP in Computing, Hacking, Patches, Windows on November 26th, 2009
When using Windows Live Messenger, if you don’t have Windows Media Player installed, and try to tick “Show what I’m listening to”, you will receive a message saying “This feature requires Windows Media Player 9 or later. To install the latest version of Windows Media Player, click Ok”, for those of you like me, who dislike Windows Media Player, will understand why i would not use it, however i am using Windows 7, and Windows Media Player causes havoc with the file associations when setting them for a 3rd party media player, the best way to do it is remove WMP altogether.
Upon removing it, i ran into the problem above, and i know its only an aesthetic feature in WLM, but i like to have it enabled, so i started looking for a way to re enable it, i actually started looking at the Assembly of WLM, but alot of files are loaded, so i couldn’t find the energy to look, but then it dawned on me to use the registry for it, so i did, and i found a solution and wrote a little tool to enable Now Playing.
A download to my tool can be downloaded below, its totally clean, literally compiled it 5 minutes ago.
File: WLM_NowPlaying_Enabler.exe
Size: 211 KB
Internet speed, Common Misconception
Posted by BrandiniMP in Computing, Networking on August 1st, 2009
When we pay for our internet connection, we pay for a specific speed of connection, however many people have a misconception about what your connection speed is.
Okay usually when we look at our connection speeds we see (for example) 8Mb, with the unit it is calculated in being Mb, now people seem to assume that Mb stands for MegaByte, wheras really Mb stands for MegaBit, which is 1/8th of a MegaByte (MB = Megabyte, Mb = MegaBit), so in reality when you pay for 8Mb (MegaBit) connection speed you’re really getting a 1MB (MegaByte) connection speed.
Additionally, when people talk about Internet (Data) Speeds, they refer to/look upon it as a literal speed, or the time taken to get from Point A to Point B, really this is not true, when you look at data speed in a unit of data you are really looking at the amount of data that can be sent simultaneously, (usually) per second, the time that data takes to get from Point A to Point B is called Latency (or Ping time), and yes it is true, that Fiber Optic connections are faster, not because it can send more data per second, but because it lowers latency, which generally can improve your internet speed, however bare in mind, that when using the internet, you’re both sending and receiving data, so if the sender has poor latency, or a limited connection speed (Mb/s) you too will feel the decrease in performance.
Update – Socialite removed.
Posted by BrandiniMP in Updates on August 1st, 2009
Socialite was annoying me, so i uninstalled it, and installed a new plugin called Socialize This, which supports automatic Twitter updates, i have also set twitter to automatically update my Facebook.
Halo 1.00.08.0616 Exploit
A few months ago in an old version of Halo (PC and CE) there was an exploit called HaloLoop3 and its 2 predecessors (HL1 and HL2) these were fixed in the new release of Halo (01.00.08.0616), or so we thought, it has been discovered that using the haloloop proof of concept (v1, v2 or v3) application, written by Luigi Auriemma in a Denial of Service (DoS) fashion, you can cause a buffer overrun error in the server which then leads to “Gathering Exception Data” from Halo’s inbuilt exception handler, below i have made a quick demonstration of this.
Video: Show
Fortunately i was informed of this new method of attacking before it was a widely known fact, and i created a patch for both HaloPC and HaloCE, downloads can be found below.
Special Thanks to:
»°Gì°« Boris – For informing me of this new method.
Biohazard – For helping me look for the cause of the problem.
Patrickssj6 – For teaching me the basics of Assembly and Memory modification.
Downloads:
Halo PC 1.00.08.0616 Dedicated Server – MD5: 38d801d83a353a0753fdc61f11c03070
Halo CE 1.00.08.0609 Dedicated Server – MD5: 480cecdbd15f76113ec85e5abaec1f59
Halo PC 1.00.04.0607 Dedicated Server – MD5: 8de74b246763b6a938b42883e4ab0904
Halo CE 1.00.00.0619 Dedicated Server – MD5: c9502d80362c5c1735e679801fc1ed6d
Additional Features:
No CD key check
No version check
No ASCII check on names
Documentation:
http://vivid-abstractions.net/brandinimp/halo_loop_dos.txt
Notes:
I have contacted Roger Wolfson at Bungie and they have no intention of creating a new patch for this.
If you have a problem with anything you have read here or me, please keep it to yourself and don’t use the patch, its very simple.
Disclaimer
I, BrandiniMP, am in no way affiliated with Bungie Game Studios or Microsoft, and these works are properties of their respective owners, this is not an official patch from the creators of Halo and you use at your own risk.
Updates: Blog
Posted by BrandiniMP in Updates on June 11th, 2009
Right, so this morning i have updated the Wordpress script to 2.8 Stable, fixed a couple of bugs in some plugins, added Facebook connect and done a bit of tweaking, not a bad job if i do say so myself 
Blog to Facebook: Socialite
Posted by BrandiniMP in Updates on June 11th, 2009
Okay, well i just installed the Wordpress plugin, Socialite, which will now publish my posts on Facebook.
This is a test of that, if you will.
Windows Reinstall
Posted by BrandiniMP in Computing, Updates, Windows on June 10th, 2009
Well ive finally finished setting up my new Windows installation, i had a few problems on the way, but atleast i know how to fix them now.
When doing some system tasks such as saving my display settings or running some programs, my mouse would lag out (cursor would slow down and jump about a bit), its not really a big issue, but it was annoying, now before my reinstall i never had this problem, so i couldnt figure out why, so i added every possible Windows tweak i could, but nothing seemed to work.
Then today i was playing some games, completely unrelated, and i had just installed Unreal Tournament 3, but whenever i ran it, it would crash after the splash video, so i did some googling and eventually installed “AMD Dual-Core Optimizer Version 1.1.4″ as i have an AMD Athlon 64 x2 4200 processor, this made the game work, and it fixed my mouse lag problem, sod’s law eh?
Anyways my current system specs are:
Operating system: Windows XP Professional SP3 (32-bit)
Graphics card: nVidia 9800 GT+ 1GB (with most recent BETA drivers)
Motherboard: ECS GeForce6100PM-M2 (V2.0) (with most recent nVidia chipset BETA drivers)
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 x2 4200 @ 2.44GHz (overclocked)
DirectX: 10.00
Here is a little tour video because i like making videos : Show
Gain Elevated Administrator Privileges
Posted by BrandiniMP in Computing, Exploits, Hacking, Windows on June 10th, 2009
Below is a video showing you how to gain full access to a passworded computer and then return it to the way it was prior to you doing anything.
Video: Show
Hack.Bat: Show
Offline Registry Editor: http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/
A Blog
Posted by BrandiniMP in Updates on June 9th, 2009
Right, i finally decided to make use of BrandiniMP.com which i have had for years, so here it is, a blog.
I have also filled my About page, i got a bit carried away when writing, but oh well
