I havent tried to re-activate a used product sold to me with steam but I did try with blizzard and they told me tough poop. In the US I wouldn't expect to get anything from the companies, but I don't know about where you are.

dicky96 wrote on 2020-05-29, 17:05:

Hi guys first let me just say I am not trying to pirate anything. I buy a lot of old games at the flea market and play them no […]
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Hi guys first let me just say I am not trying to pirate anything. I buy a lot of old games at the flea market and play them no problem (well not TOO many problems) but I am struggling with this one

I have a physical Copy of The Orange Box (Hafe Life 2 Ep 2) and I can't install it. I do have a Steam Account, though I don't really have a use for it, and it will not let me redeem the key.

When I try to install from the game from the disk I have the same problem as it will not accept the key. I also have another old Game called Counter Strike Condition Zero which Steam would not let me redeem the key as it has been used but I installed that on my XP rig and it runs fine anyway.

As I own the physical product, I am sure I am on the moral high ground when it comes to playing the contents of the disks I bought, and in fact EU law even says that is the case.

So how do I play the game? Pics to show I do have the physical game..

And as an aside, even games that are a only a few years old now will be retro games faster than you thought, So what is going to happen in 20 years time with the retro gaming scene if we can't buy and play old games?

For the Original Half-life 2, the only way to play without using steam is the collector edition. All others version you will need use the Serial number + steam client. I got the 2005 dvd version of HL2 and never worked because you need install the steam client ( the older green one during the setup).
The orange Box is a later version.

dicky96 wrote on 2020-05-29, 17:05:

I buy a lot of old games at the flea market and play them no problem (well not TOO many problems) but I am struggling with this one

I have a physical Copy of The Orange Box (Hafe Life 2 Ep 2) and I can't install it. I do have a Steam Account, though I don't really have a use for it, and it will not let me redeem the key.

If you bought it at the flea market, then surely it has occurred to you that someone else probably redeemed the key already? Is this the first time you've encountered this problem?

As I own the physical product, I am sure I am on the moral high ground when it comes to playing the contents of the disks I bought, and in fact EU law even says that is the case.

Doesn't the box say something or other about registration keys on it?

So what is going to happen in 20 years time with the retro gaming scene if we can't buy and play old games?

Even if it isn't for sale one way or another (which seems very unlikely), there will be thousands upon thousands of "archived" cracked copies of the data hoarded in the name of "preservation". And only a tiny fraction of people with said copies will have the slightest interest in actually playing them.

The problem is you have a broken product twice over. One for the DRM, two because Episode 2, Portal and TF2 are broken on the DVD.
You can download the detonation release but the builds are older than what is on the DVD.
To extract the working products you need to use Phoenix and then use revemu to run the games without steam. (Revemu works all the way down to Half-Life 2 1.0 Build 2187) (Builds v5135 and higher are DRM free)

I once tried to do a diff between the detonation and the Orange box to fix the broken Orange Box but didn't have much luck. Plan to look into it again sometime.

After many hours comparing the Orangebox detonation and Retail releases I've found out the following: […]
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After many hours comparing the Orangebox detonation and Retail releases I've found out the following:

The Detonation release is an old version except for HL2 Source 2707.

EP2, Portal and TF2 are broke in Orangebox Retail like due to broken Source 2007 binaries but could be other files

DETONATION RELEASE
Unpack each GCF with GCFSCAPE

ORANGE BOX RETAIL RELEASE
Use Phoenix to unpack
DO NOT UNPACK TO GCF!
EP2, Portal and TF2 broken

HALF-LIFE 2 (Source 2707) (Orangebox Retail and Detonation)
half-life 2 content
half-life 2 game dialog
source engine
source materials
source models
source sounds

HL2 (3264) Detonation
HL2 (3531) Orangebox Retail
half-life 2 content
half-life 2 game dialog
base source engine 2
source materials
source models
source sounds

HALE-LIFE 2 + EPISODE 1 (3264) Detonation
HALE-LIFE 2 + EPISODE 1 (3531) Orangebox
Use same HL2 3264 GCF files
episode 1 shared
half-life 2 episode one

HALF-LIFE 2 EPISODE 2 + PORTAL + TEAMFORTRESS 2 (3300) Detonation

HL2
episode two content
episode two maps
episode two materials
half-life 2 episode two english
episodic 2007 shared
episode 1 shared
Source 2007 binaries
Source 2007 shared materials
Source 2007 shared models
Source 2007 shared sounds
source materials
source models
source sounds

PORTAL
portal content
portal english

TEAM FORTRESS 2
team fortress 2 client content
team fortress 2 content
team fortress 2 materials

AFAIK the only games released nowadays on DVD usually just come with the client with no data files.

As for being able to buy and play games and being able to play them the way you want to in the future without being granted aproval:
1. Buy or don't buy and crack the games
2. Download already cracked games
3. Buy or download DRM free games
4. Only play old games

This assumes most games don't move to streaming and leave non-streaming in the dust. That remains to be seen. Hopefully if this happens the niche of people not willing to use streaming will be large enough for AAA games but most AAA games are shit so not much of a loss. I imagine in 10yrs we'll have a bunch of "retro" users on vogons running Gears 5 on an i7 930 running some early Windows 10 build from a streaming service.

My game folder is currently 25TB so I'm ready for the streaming apocalypse. 😀

Jorpho wrote on 2020-05-29, 17:49:

dicky96 wrote on 2020-05-29, 17:05:

I buy a lot of old games at the flea market and play them no problem (well not TOO many problems) but I am struggling with this one

I have a physical Copy of The Orange Box (Hafe Life 2 Ep 2) and I can't install it. I do have a Steam Account, though I don't really have a use for it, and it will not let me redeem the key.

If you bought it at the flea market, then surely it has occurred to you that someone else probably redeemed the key already? Is this the first time you've encountered this problem?

Well actually, no. The last games I ever bought or played back in the day was Tomb Raider 3. After that, life and interrsts moved on, and I never touched a computer game until about 18 months ago when I spotterd some old PC hardware at the flea market and got interested in messing around with old PCs. Then I went back and played the old Tomb Raider games I still had, and started to look for others to play. So in a way I am retro gaming games that I never played, or even had any interest in gaming, when they were released.

This is the first time I got an old game (what is it 10 years or more?) that would not just install or I couldn't find some patch to make it work. Call me stupid if you like but I didn't know that CD keys that come with games could only be used once, because it was not a problem back in the day. I had not heard of this redeeming thing until I tried to play this game a couple days ago. Almost all the second hand games I find are for Windows 98 or XP.

There are loads of used original Orange Box sold on ebay, I checked sold listings and they sell regularly, and they go for more than the 1 or 2 euros I paied for this one. So there must be a way to play them otherwsie why would people buy them?

DosFreak wrote on 2020-05-29, 17:59:

To extract the working products you need to use Phoenix and then use revemu to run the games without steam. (Revemu works all the way down to Half-Life 2 1.0 Build 2187) (Builds v5135 and higher are DRM free)

OK thanks. I don't know what Phoenix and revemu is but I bet google will help me now i know what to look for

Probably mostly those who just want a physical product to look at,
Secondary assuming the key works possibly cheaper copy of HL2 when they go to install it with Steam (Steam won't install it off the CD but just download the latest version),
Third probably because they are ignorant.

I can't share links for revemu or phoenix here but they are well known. Google should find them.

Yeah that's OK mate. I'm a big advocate for freedom of speech but I am sure google will be happy to speak to me me once I know what to ask for. A lot of this stuff is new to me and quite exciting.

And to be quite honest I find the challenge of getting things working is usually more interesting than playing the result. Much the same in building and configuring 20-30 year old computers than actually using them 🤣

This is something that bugs the hell out of me with some modern games that have physical releases way after their initial release.

Take Ion Fury: the collectors edition was DRM free on a USB key, the GoG version is of course DRM free, so why the hell does the upcoming DVD release require Steam? It makes the thing pointless. Don't get me wrong, I use Steam a lot, but if I'm going to buy a physical copy of something, I don't want its functionality to be linked to the existence of a service. I've ran into that problem before.

what we need is a crack that kicks the steam-drm out of the executables. for pc and mac.
i really would love to play and install the games i bought on my retro-machines the way I like it,
not that shitty steam that always moves to the next os after a view years.

the old days were great..cd/dvd in, no cdcrack and you are good to go...

OK I googled and found how to do this on a Vogons Thread which looks easy to follow

How to install and run vanilla Half-Life 2 without Steam

But i failed at the first step as I can't find the CAB files. I just have a load of files name Sid.

So what do I do?

You need to use Phoenix (Phoenix_15rc2) to extract SID files.

Is there a way to get the reflecting roof of the hl2-demo back in the game?

Hmm OK. not one to give up, I googled for Sid and it says I can these are kinda like zip files and I can unpack them with Phoenix SID unpacker. So it sounds like those Sid files are like Cab files and would have the files i need in them.

But where do I get that Phoenix from? The first link in google is to some other software, the next half a dozen links say there is threat on the page and Avast does not want me to go there. I found one that did not give a threat warning but it was V1.3 and part way through the download Avast says it could be dangerous. Really this is not a problem as the Windows XP I am using is only for retro gaming, has no personal details on it and never normally even has an internet connection so the worse that could happen I just format and reinstall XP SP3. But it would be good to know I have the correct software. Is there a home page?

Oopps some replies before I posted again, I missed them. Seems I was heading in the right direction though

Thought that would help but no. Googled Phoenix 15_RC2 found the first link to cutedrive page, downloaded it 17Mb no virus but it is just a load of php files

Trying to find this software is taking me to some very murky places. I found some youtube tutorials but any links they give didn't work either. Could some kind person PM me a link to it?

Thanks

You have PM.

Something else to try would be to see if there are any original Orange Box releases with 2007 GCF files and then compare against the Orange Box files to verify they are from the same build and then just that. You'll usually see people recommend the detonation release but as mentioned previously it's an older build.
I do have alot of unsorted HL2 builds to go through to compare eventually.

OK So I don't know if I am doing this right, but when I copied the two disks to the PC I ended up with those SIM and SID files as I posted above.

So I used Phoenix (which seems to be something rather like winrar) and Scanned the SIM files. I then extracted all the files found with disk 1 sim then disk 2 sim into another folder and ended up with a load of files in a few top level directories. I did a search but there are no exe files, such as hl2.exe, in there, so I looked on disk 1 and copied the other top level files from there to the folder that I used as a target to extract all the SID files

See pic, which is what I have now.

I can run setup.exe but that just starts the setup same as if I autorun the first disk

I know i am supposed to use revemu now but this is all a bit new to me.

Having said that I find this stuff really interesting, so what should I do next? Or did I make a mistake or miss some step already?

Thanks