Today the news arrived that Electronic Arts had a bit of bad luck; in the printing procees a large set of manuals, which hold the license key required to install Red Aler 3, is missing the last character of the game license. Only 19 characters were printed while a correct serial is comprised of 20 characters.

People who are affected by this can do one of two things, and I hope to add a third later today.

1) Scan your manual, mail it to Electronic Arts, and they will send you your serial number
2) Try to brute-force the serial numer (trying 0-9 an A-Z)

Since brute forcing the serial is the fastest solution, but not really a nice solution, I decided to write a program that will do the brute-forcing for you. When done (don't have Red Alert 3 yet), it will allow you to enter your 19 characters and will brute-force the last character for you.

UPDATE

Click here to request the download file.

The program will check for the File "EASetup.exe" on every drive from C to Z, and will pick the one he finds first. If the file is not found, it will prompt you to insert the Red Alert 3 DVD.

The main program will show now (see screenshot), and you can enter your 19 characters of the serial number here (focus will adjust as you type the key, so no need to tab).

Once all characters have been entered, press Crack. This will launch the Red Alert 3 setup.

The EA setup will auto-close after three invalid tries, so the program will re-launch the setup as much times as needed and keeps trying the missing character till a valid entry is found.

Once the key is found, the program will display a message box so that you can write it down for future reference, and after pressing ok, the program will exit.

I hope you appreciate my efforts.

UPDATE 2 @ 4th of November 2008 - Midnight

The last three days, over 1650 people have read my article on this problem and my solution. Hundreds of the people who read it have downloaded it. I've also posted in on the biggest torrent site in the world, since I believe this program helped people enjoy the game they purchased, which has almost 3300 counted downloads (there are sites that mirror this site, which handle their own downloads, these statistics are not counted).

Since so many people like my program, and no one else has released a tool like this yet, I decided to put up the Source Code of the application up for sale. Be it for other programmers to learn (added comments), people wanting to see how it all works, or just to do something back, that's up to you.

Of cource the normal download will stay available for download free of charge. The source code will be up for purchase at only EUR 0.99.

Sincerely,

Nick Kusters.