defeating_gfwl.md

Games for Windows Live (GFWL)

Any sufficiently terrible DRM is indistinguishable from malware. Not only does this one try to prevent pirates from playing, it's also notorious for causing an endless amount of issues for legitimate players. Luckily for us, GFWL is actually quite trivial to bypass. Unluckily for us, it's usually present around other annoying DRM from that time period, like Securom, so GFWL games still end up being a bit of a mess.

We're going to use a GFWL emulator from catspaw to defeat this DRM. You can find this emulator in cs.rin's Main Forum -> Releases section (thread ID 60668). The most recent version (15d) of this emulator is on page 66 of this thread, posted by user machine4578. Grab this for your toolkit. I have not tested many GFWL games, but if you find that the catspaw emulator is not sufficient, feel free to try a few other emulators that are on page 74 of that thread, posted by user talos910. xlivelessness also exists as an option.

Cracking Guide

For our walkthrough we'll be cracking the GFWL DRM on Fable III. This game is easy to source via cs.rin's Main Forum (thread ID 59454), or you can follow along with your own GFWL-protected game. Fable III is infested with DRM, but so are most GFWL games. It's protected by Steamworks API, Securom, and GFWL.

1. Source Fable III and extract it to your workspace

2. [Fable III ONLY] Winetricks xact is required for Fable III to run, otherwise it will crash after intro videos

3. [Fable III ONLY] Defeat Steamworks API protection (remember that this is a DirectX9 game, so if you use Goldberg Experimental build you need to disable the overlay or it may crash on Linux)

4. [Fable III ONLY] Defeat Securom protection (we crack Fable III in the Securom guide as well)

5. Extract xlive.dll and xlive.ini from catspaw's GFWL emulator to your game directory.

6. Configure xlive.ini:

   • profile name 1 - Change to whatever you want your name to show up as ingame

   • online profile - Toggle emulation of a fake "online" account, depending on the game

7. We're almost ready, but since we're using Wine, we need to tell Wine to leave our DLL alone. By default, Wine hijacks some DLLs that load and replaces them with its own versions at runtime. We're going to explicitly tell Wine that if it sees our DLL, it should let it load without interfering. If it doesn't see the DLL we specify, then it will try to load its own DLL as normal.

8. We can inform Wine of this configuration by using Lutris. If you use another tool, there should be a section somewhere for this, or worst-case you can use the WINEDLLOVERRIDES environment variable, like WINEDLLOVERRIDES="xlive=n,b". To do this in Lutris, open your game's configuration and navigate to Runner Options -> DLL Overrides. Input xlive as a key and n,b as a value. n,b stands for "Native, then Built-in", aka Wine should preferentially let the game's local DLL load if available, or fallback to the Built-in Wine version if it's not.

   

9. GFWL is now defeated!

• If you want to unlock DLC for your game, you will likely have to read through your game's cs.rin thread. You need to source the physical DLC files and put them in a DLC folder in your game directory.