Pro Hack

Well..its been a long time I am writing a gaming article, I actually got bored of playing with routers and thought to give myself a break and return to hack and slash genre. I picked up Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition (dmc3se) for my laptop, and the game is a poor port by Sourcenext which are equal culprits in porting Onimusha 3, Resident Evil 4 on PC on behalf of Capcom , its a pity that Ubisoft (which marketed the game for PC) and Capcom wasted such a brilliant opportunity for catering PC gamers. The issues which are faced by game are -

• Worst control scheme ever devised, controls by which only monkeys can play
• Poor graphics and shadow effects
• Bad joystick detection.
• Even Worse analog stick detection and camera issues.
• Choppy music.

If you are reading it, I guess you have already felt the pain and googled it a lot. Well, fear not , I will counter them one all : ] just read on.

Let me divide the problem into 2 categories – control issues and other issues. Well..I divided it into these two because the solution will address them in the following manner. First, Install the game properly, choose the correct directory (or whatever you want) insert correct serial key, make sure its a clean install.

Once you have done that, head on to Ubisoft  and download the latest 1.3 patch for your respective version. Its absolutely critical to download and install this patch for solving the issues.

Once done, open the patch and install it. Your Music, graphical issues shall be solved as of now.

Solving Controller Issues

With 1.3 patch, you will be getting a utility GPadCfg.exe at your game directory for configuring gamepad. Open it and click on edit, click on the buttons in the picture and press respective button on gamepad.

Once done, DOUBLE CLICK on save button to save the config.  Dont click on L<->R REVERSE button.

Now, your controller is mapped to game. Now go to game directory and open DMC3SE.ini . Make sure to make a backup of it though. GO to end of DMC3SE.ini and look for the section for your gamepad config. It will look like this.

Now, edit it, such that L3 and R3 (the analog buttons) are cleared.

Now , download xpadder 5.3 from here . Once downloaded, open it . In case , you are using Windows 7 and it doesnt opens, right click on Xpadder.exe, go to compatibility and run it in Windows Vista SP2 mode.

Also, go to folder where DMC3SE is installed, and give full permissions to the user.

Now open xpadder.exe, make sure your controller is connected to your PC/Laptop.  Click on controller icon to create a new profile.

Go to stickds/button/dpad tab and enable and press the respective buttons.

Once done, go to finish tab and click on close.

Once done, click on the buttons on the interface and map the LEFT ANALOG to W, A, S , D keys on the keyboard .

Your final xpadder configuration will look like this.

Save it. Now open the game and enjoy : ] , your controller will work fine.

I hope you will enjoy the game as much as I am enjoying it : ]

First of all, sorry for a late post, I have been busy in researching DDOS mitigation solutions, and have been going through a lot of data sheets, specs and devices for the same. Also, Prohack celebrated its one more year of its technological legacy and I thought why not to cover about what made me tick and started it all..Well...to be frank, it was the games, old school games.

The earliest memory of a videogame I played was at the local computer centre (Hind Computers) at my local town, it was Jordan Mechner's Prince of Persia in mid nineties, well..I remember the beautiful graphics on the monochrome monitors, elusive I must say, but I knew I was hooked to it for my life. It was also my first interaction with computers.

The 90's were a sort of a period when you can get your hands on an Atari (if you were lucky) , a PC (if your parents were either merchants and needed the machine for their financial transactions..or just hard-core geeks) or Terminator Ending Man series of NES clones that later in early 2000's flooded the market. The arcade scene boomed (provided you knew the places) and old CPS1 machines saw bouts of Street Fighter 2, Cadillac's and Dinosaurs (Fondly called as Mustafa due to the titular and strong character of the game) and if you were lucky Tekken 3 .

As time progressed home consoles, as I already said I witnessed 8 bit revolution in India when it was almost forgotten by the east and west. Well..not bad for me. I got my hands on an NES clone (Media 1000) for which I was able to get the Chinese/Taiwanese multicarts every once in a while, and witnessed the greatness of late eighties and early 90's in the form of Mario, Mario 3, Contra , Super C, Rockman , Mighty Final Fight, Metal Gear, Zen - The Intergalactic Ninja, Kage (Shadow of Ninja, Jap version) , Nekketsu series, Summer Carnival 92 - Recca , Little Ninja Bros,Disney’s Jungle Book, GIJOE, TMNT 3/ 4 Tournament Fighters and much much more..and to be frank, Capcom, Konami and Nintendo were my Gods .

I witnessed 16 bit gaming during my summer vacations at modded arcades at Dehradun (Tibet Coloney, Buddha temple, they are still there today), modded in the sense that they were home consoles of Sega Genesis/Mega Drive and SNES, which were fitted with Hori Style arcade sticks and hooked up to make shift cabinets, when for 5 Rs you can get your hands on Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 , Comix Zone, Contra Hardcorps, Street Fighter 2 , Super Mario World for 30 minutes and lots more. Players duelled there and its there I got my first taste of fatalities in UMK3, and I am still good in pulling them off without breaking a sweat. Its there I had my first contact with 3d fighters like Tekken 3, Street Fighter Ex/EX2/plus , Mortal Kombat 4 and many more and I longed for my summer vacations so that I could go to my native place and play the games .

Growing up, I had my first RPG as Little Ninja Brothers by Culture Brain, when I bought the multicart, I was perplexed by the gameplay as I wasn't used to the concept of resource mining/hogging, spells, random encounters and a chained story. Getting dragstar, beating Devillion, getting to Yokan , the 7 bells..I now realise how generic it was , but back then , the sweet taste of going into an adventure in your own way was awesome. Nevertheless, I had a record of beating each game I got and mastering to the point of flawless execution, a thing that needed time which my parents frowned upon, a lot. The second thing they hated the most was the chiptune music which I liked a lot (still have a great collection of them today :) in my cell phone ) which later hooked me to the demoscene, I am a fan of the Farbrausch, .theprodukkt, Fairlight, mfx, kewlers and used to enjoy the intros/cracktros in my pastime.

Then there was Prateek, he had a blazing fast Pentium 3 at his home and I remember him cursing Windows and playing Dinocrisis (and swooning on Regina :P) , on a side note, we also started our experiments by getting a copy of Turbo Linux, experimenting with it , then after bouts of frustration and incoherent manuals (it was a time when IT WAS HARD finding the correct Linux drivers for your box, coding them was out of question since we were kids) but that's a different story. Doom , Dangerous Dave and Wolfenstein 3d was what we had with us at that time as shooters. Then after a lot of haggling, and by scoring good marks i was able to get a Sega Genesis for me (PAL version, used, with my first carts as Contra Hardcorps and Utlimate Mortal Kombat 3) and I spent my days tinkering with Super Hang On, Monaco GP, Rambo, Aladdin and lots more. It was during those days when I got a PC and then, my life was changed.

At that time, PC for me meant 3 things -

• Games
• Programming
• Internet

Of which Games was the primary part and programming was done at late hours of night (VB/VBS if you are curious, it was in my courseware at school , I moved on to C as I got bored of dragging and dropping and wanted some real challenge).Initial games were Project IGI, handful of Virgin interactive classics (The Lion King..anyone ?) The real twist came when I picked up a dusty copy of Street Fighter Alpha 3 from a shop, and when I ran it from CD, a DOS based interface opened , and the game ran. But there was something peculiar about it, it wasn't exactly DOS based, I later figured out, the game ran in DOS mode using an emulator, which was a new term for me, but as a rule of thumb, anything that made me play games is something to be learnt and something to get good at, I started exploring them. I am lucky it was in those days emulation scene was still kicking ass, with fresh releases of Kawaks/Nebula/Final burn Alpha and all other CPS/CPS2/PGM emulation systems lots of documentation to read, a great community to mix and great games to play. It was then I found I had an inherent taste in emulation and I had a hand on almost all emulators which ever found their way to Zophar's Domain or scene sites. I found my own configurations that worked for me (and my own box) flawlessly, debugging through 68000 debugger in Kawaks , the first taste of loading games through Callous, and playing Super Mario World using SNES 9x (without paying money again, ever :D) .I used to play “borrowed” MAME roms on early builds of MAME and the understood the full glory of arcades . I remember playing Chronotrigger (the best RPG I played..ever) on ZSNES and dumping SPC files, only to be later converted into mp3 and then playing the sweet music on Sunday mornings. Nobuo Uematsu..thanks for making my childhood sweet.

It was due to emulators , I witnessed the actual history of gaming , starting from Spacewar to Atari, the console wars between Nintendo and Sega, the ditching of Sony by Nintendo, the revenge of Sony in the form of Playstation, the Sega 32 X, Saturn and the dawn of Sega, the tryst of Nintendo in the form of N64 , the console wars of millennium starting from the iconic date of 9/9/99 , the failing of Sega as a hardware developer and Dreamcast being ousted from market despite its innovations, the PS2 and Xbox and coming to the semi-present day scenario of PS3 vs XBOX 360 and the coming next generation of consoles.

Later on when it came to PC Gaming, we formed the Project IGI club, guys who started their PC gaming careers with their first game as Codemaster’s Project IGI and finding new and innovative ways to beat it. Also, when it came to PC gaming, Prateek and my brother Vaibhav , both hated me for emulators, according to them it was lame and the latest was the best, I on the other had found anything with a configuration file worth my time and played through all the classic titles one by one. The only game we all agreed was awesome was Mario Kart 64 on Project 64, hell, who would argue it was bad :) Then there were PlayStation emulators epsxe/pcsx/adripsx/psx and the best plugin pack you could get your hands on – Aldo’s Plugin Pack, having the best drivers from one of my favourite coder Pete Bernert , his fantastic plugins were easy to tweak/compile (courtesy of his PE oPs project) and had exceptional performance.

Coming of age , I got my hands on Halo: Combat Evolved, CS 1.6 , Hitman series, Max Payne series of which I still can repeat dialogues of Max Payne line by line, I just liked the Nordic ,violent,noir setting of the game like with a great story line. It was also at that time I came across modern emulators PCSX2 , CXBX/DXBX, Potemkin, XEON, Dolphin,  Chankast and found except Chankast each one of them required to have an Alienware or Origin PC to even run the games (well, I wanted to play God of War at that time, bad..but they were on nascent stage then) , in laymen terms, they needed exceptionally high configurations just to croak  . I also found Doom 3 also needed an Alienware to run :| literally.

After a while, I found the emulation scene started getting stagnant with few updates and releases and I started focusing on genres I haven't tried. At this point of time, I vaguely remembered a trailer of Metal gear Solid 3 : Snake Eater in an early review at Ten Sports, and thought to give a shot to the series starting of MGS on EPSXE.

That proved to be the most exciting gaming experiences of my life.

Well..i found it alluring, awesome storyline, well developed characters, a gruff snake and the best voice acting I have ever heard on a videogame . Wow..just wow. It was time for Metal Gear Solid 2 : Substance on PC and got my copy cheap off from a retail shop. the experience ? Well..2 words – Fucking Awesome ! I will cover it in a later review some other day. Also, during those days. I saw a demo of RE4 on a gamecube machine and its still the best survival horror game ever. Speaking of which, my life had came a full circle, Capcom’s Shinji Mikami’s RE , Capcom Clover’s Killer 7,Hideki Kamiya’s Devil May Cry, Konami’s Hideo Kojima’s MGS and Shigeru Miyamato’s Mario series..Everything a gamer could want. Capcom, Konami and Nintendo..the game Gods revisited again.

Mid and late 2000’s brought me Warcraft 3, StarCraft, Farcry, Half life 2 , Prince of Persia : Warrior Within (which I only play due to the refined combo system and kickass music by Godsmack) and CPS3. A special mention to Half Life 2 for the most immersive shooter of its time, although I wished the crap about G Man was solved :X . While Warcraft 3 and Starcraft are the best RTS experience, the reverse engineering of CPS3 encryption was what caught my eye during those days. One of the first POC emulators was written by Miguel Angel 'ElSemi' Horna better known as Elsemi of Nebula fame and one of the first games which I played was Street Fighter 3. Heck, CPS3 means Street Fighter 3, the finest and most technical fighting game ever made. Don't believe me ? well..just Google “Evolution 2004 Daigo” and you will know what I mean. Its the pinnacle of fighting genre only for the dedicated. Nowadays, add GGPO to it and you get a heady mix of online play in the most competitive manner in an already highly competitive game.

Nowadays, a lot of titles are revised, repacked and innovative games are being launched, you have got staples like Street Fighter 4, Killzone, God Of War 3 , Gears, RE, MGS, Super Mario Galaxy / Galaxy 2, Halo 3, Portal/Portal 2 (however I liked Narbular Drop just as much) and the innovation bandwagon of Bastion, Tower of Goo, Limbo, Bulletstorm,Journey, Infamous and a lot more..they are online and fun, the DLC allows for replayability , but still, I prefer the old school emulation any day over the current titles. Call me a nerd, but then, thats the way I am . As i type this , i have an opponent waiting for a rematch on Third Strike.

I had a great gaming childhood, if you had one, you might share my sentiments, else, I just might have some great geeky stories to tell you.

Since my data card limit was over, so i got Reliance Netconnect from a colleague, thought it might come handy while posting “IP Subnetting - The easy way” at Prohack and some simple surfing, I was already skeptic of taking the data card actually as I previously had a very bad experience with Reliance Netconnect  and doubted if their broadband services are any good. I bet my MTS Mblaze makes it eat dirt any day ,but I had no option at that moment and thought , lets give the fucker another chance.

Ah well..you can say it was more than bad. Firstly, the data card has pretty bad speeds (~30 KBps) and then connection dropping issues. Mind you, I live in Delhi NCR and get full signal bars all the time on Reliance Netconnect Broadband + but still it barely managed to load Facebook. I thought, why not to change the DNS, on experimenting, I found Open DNS and Verizon DNS to be the most stable of all and I got a speed boost of 90-100 KBps : ]]

Here is how you can Increase speed of Reliance Netconnect Broadband + datacard -

Plugin your data card, launch application, go to settings, click on edit.

Click on advanced and put DNS server IPs. I found Verizon 4.2.2.2 //4.2.2.1 and Open DNS  208.67.222.222 // 208.67.220.220 work best for me. You can also try Google DNS 8.8.8.8 // 8.8.4.4 . Experiment and pick your choice.

Once done, click OK, save it and connect. you will get improved speeds..The whole process makes me wonder why Reliance’s default DNS is so slow . Do they even use their datacards at their home ? :|

On to my story, Since, even after changing DNS, the speeds were not good enough for me, so I thought, why not to recharge my MTS Data card online and then use it.  Instantly I opened MTS website and after entering required details, transferring money to MTS from my online account, the page hanged and session was timed out. Responding to my sense of deja vu, I checked the data card and found it was not sending/receiving any data. the fucker dropped the connection just I when i was about to get my transaction completed.

I guess it took its revenge :X

I immediately emailed to MTS customer care/RechargeItNow/Bank customer care and I have *yet* to receive a helpful followup message on email. I contacted MTS customer care on phone and entered 1,1,1,1,<datacard MDN number>,1 waited for 2 minutes 46 seconds (yeah..i timed it) , the automated IVR said “after several tries you have not entered any number, so we are transferring your call to our expert” . Well..it wasn't my fault, again, there is some fault in their system as I tried 3 different valid MDN numbers later on and I got the same result. Nevertheless, I was put on call with an *expert* to whom I explained my issue and asked for escalation matrix, the details of email ID and in simple words, “what to do in case of transaction failure, the MTS way ? ”

The result was flabbergasting, the CCE spoke in an english which by all means was incomprehensible to me, I politely disconnected the call and then fumed for 2-3 minutes while looking at the Reliance datacard.

Protip : If you  hate someone, gift him a Reliance datacard and watch him cry tears of blood :P

In the meantime i am still waiting for a positive response from my bank/MTS/rechargeitnow.

That was last night and I guess i have been outsmarted by a pathetic Reliance Netconnect.

Is network subnetting driving you crazy ? Does binary math gives you headaches ? well..fear not, since the time i have delved into networks, i have gone through all the oohs and aaahs and the NAH’s of the logical crescendo , and I present you the easiest way to do subnetting. Generally,3 questions are being addressed when subnetting an IP-

1. No of subnets
2. No of valid hosts and
3. Host range/block size

We will tackle them one by one. First you need to know about IP addresses and their classes.

Class A includes 0-127 where 0 and 127 are reserved, the default subnet mask for this class is /8 .

Class B includes 128-191 in their first octet, and the default subnet mask for this class is /16

Class C deals with 192-224 in their first octet and the default subnet mask for this class is /24

Also, also, understand a simple concept, subnet masks lying between 8- 15 are A class masks, from 16- 23 are B class and 24-32 are C class masks. Furthermore, a subnet mask can be expressed as this where (N)etwork value and (H)ost values-

Class A : 255.0.0.0   = NNNNNNNN.HHHHHHHH.HHHHHHHH.HHHHHHHH  
Class B : 255.255.0.0 = NNNNNNNN.NNNNNNNN.HHHHHHHH.HHHHHHHH 
Class C : 255.255.0.0 = NNNNNNNN.NNNNNNNN.NNNNNNNN.HHHHHHHH
Class mask value          8        16        24        32

Now once you see it, lets tackle some real life questions. Lets find the no of subnets and valid hosts for 192.168.10.10/18

See this ? its a C class IP address having a mask of B class (as the mask lies between 16-24) now, in order to find the number of subnets, use the following formulae - 

2 ^ (What mask you have been provided – default mask of the IP address given)

putting the values here..

2^(18-16) –>  2^(2) –>  4 subnets

simple : )

Now for calculating the no.of hosts, use the below formulae -

2^(32- what mask you have been provided) –2

Putting values here..

2^(32-18)-2 -> 2^(14)-2 –> 16384-2 –> 16382 hosts

piece of cake ..

now to find the block size, see the provided mask lies between which next default mask value , which in this case is 24 (as 18 is greater than 16 and less than 24) . So ..

Subtract the provided mask with the class mask value which is greater than it.

2^(Next class mask value – provided mask)

which on putting values will be

2^(24-18) –> 2^6 –> 64

So, the block size will be of 64 . So, the IP addresses will be divided into 4 subnets (which we already calculated above) above as -

192.168.0.0 - 192.168.63.255

192.168.64.0 – 192.168.127.255

192.168.128.0 - 192.168.191.255

192.168.192.0 – 192.168.255.255

And the best part, its applicable to all classes : )

Happy Subnetting : ]

Researchers at AlientVault have uncovered a new strain of Sykipot Trojan which has been used to compromise the Department of Defense-sanctioned smart cards used to authorise network and building access at many US government agencies, the Trojan has been adapted by Chinese hackers in order to lift credentials from compromised systems in order to access classified military networks. The Trojan inadvertently targets PCs attached to smart card readers running ActivClient, the client application of ActivIdentity, in what's been described as a 'smart card proxy' attack.

Read the full Story at the Register

A new critical flaw in Wi-Fi Protected Standard (WPS) has recently been uncovered by Security researcher Stefan Viehböck that leaves wireless routers open to attack. The inherent vulnerability lies in the design protocol that splits the 8 digit PIN in two halves which reduces its complexity and henceforth the time required to crack it. Simple permutations and combinations deduce that an 8 digit pin will create 100 million possible combinations and during his testing Stefan found it takes 2 seconds to test each combination, so bruteforcing was not a feasible option.

Unfortunately, after entering the first 4 digits of a pin, the protocol used by WPS confirms if they are correct or not, which means the pairs can be attacked separately. Also, the remaining 4 digits is just a checksum, so if an attacker has the first 4 digits, he just have to try ~1000 combinations to crack it open , which brings it to a total of 11000 different combinations to the correct pin which reduces the attack time into a matter of hours. You can find the documented PDF here and read the awesomeness.

I guess router manufacturers are up for a software fix, till then , I guess we all have to go back to MAC address .

You can also read how to Hack Wifi using Backtrack , How to detect if someone is using your WiFi  or how to detect WiFi hotspots . If you are having an Android, you can also read about how to use your Android for Wardriving.

Hello fellas,

I purchased a new HP DM-3210AU machine in October, an amazing piece of hardware and one of the highest rated netbook/sub notebook of all time, and yes, I am quite impressed with its performance and capabilities. I finished my share of Call of Duty 4 on it, prepared GNS3 Topologies over it with ease and the machine chomped away everything like a no brainer. In case, ou have been wondering where I had been, you might like to read about it or want to join the Facebook page where I post more frequently .

Well..continuing to my desktop,here is how it looks : ) .

Well..then out of blue (and I think it was Redbull) I decided to write an article on 5 software I cant live without on my new machine , which allows me to simultaneously multitask on it with ease and efficiency.  Consider it as a follow up of Top 10 software I cant live without on my PC.

Windows Live Mail

Now here is one of the good things Microsoft has invented, the next generation of Outlook express, simple, easy to use, intuitive and FAST. Though you will argue why I don't use Mozilla Thunderbird over it , well..Mozilla thunderbird is almost takes the same amount of memory as its Windows counterpart, but is twice as slow in terms of interface, and speed matters to me much while checking emails, I do hope you will agree with me. Although I do hate the calendar feature of live (which is a pain due to various issues) but still, it does the primary job it was conceived for.

Download it from here.

Virtual Wifi Router

Again, an amazing piece of software that frees you from the headaches of Android Adhoc wifi patching and the likes of purchasing buggy paid software like Connectify for creating wifi network with ease. I was fed up of creating adhoc networks on Windows 7 and check that my HTC Wildfire (Cyanogen mod 7, version 2.3.7) was not able to properly detect it, there came Virtual Wifi Router to the rescue and trust me, its the best Wifi Network sharing software you will ever get. Highly recommended !!

Download Virtual Wifi Router

K-Lite Mega Codec Pack

Power user friendly yet easy to install , this codec pack will just blow you away, no need to install any other x-y-z player to do the job if your windows media player can play everything (i actually like to keep my laptop clean and use it with minimum software) from the most popular formats to arcane ones..and even allows for great amount of tweaking using its ffdshow interface. link it up with Virtualdub and you have a true gem. Included tools like Gspot, mediainfo and more add the cherry to the already delicious cake . Again, no need of VLC (unless you are into multicast streaming, to confess, i am not much of a VLC fan) and no need of anything else, one codec pack to rule them all : ) .

Download from here

GNS3

I dont think I need to elaborate upon it, since the time I have joined Tulip Telecom, it has been a part and parcel o my life, simulation of complex network topologies and whacky late night experiments (you know about them if you have been following the facebook page) are all possible because of this open source tool. Be it Cisco or juniper, it handles it with ease and the best part is that its hackable, configurable and programmable till the last drop. I have my custom version running over windows (self compiled :) ), pair it with putty connection manager and you are good to go. Also, you might want to look at sample GNS3 tutorials I posted at Prohack or more at the Facebook page.

Download it from here

Google Chrome

Now again..love it or hate it, yet I find chrome as indispensible as a browser, I had issues with Mozilla Firefox (old memory bastard) and Internet Explorer 9 (old bastard), Opera is a favourite but again, I had some issues with it again (opera link issues, broken plugins) , so I finally settled on chrome for general browsing and acceptable response times, but when it comes to testing some web based apps, i jump to Opera for the same for its intuitiveness. Trust me, when it comes to choose a browser, i call it as a choice between evils. So go with the lesser one . You might also want to look at Google Chrome Easter eggs

Download it from here

Well..that sums it up I will be back with some more ramblings of mine.

Till then,

Stay Gold..

Rishabh Dangwal