Giveaway of the Day Forums

1. 

   Dragonlair
   Member

   Some years ago I figured out how to re-direct the shortcuts from some games so they terminate but open my default browser using MY home page, not the site's page. It reduces overhead by not actually accessing the internet (my home page is a local html page).

   I would like to reduce that even further - have the internet shortcut do NOTHING - not open any browser at all, just terminate the game.

   Most games can be "adjusted" so the play.url file in the game folder isn't needed at all but some give a corrupt game error if I do that.

   Anybody know how I can have my cake and eat it too?

   TIA

   Posted 4 years ago #
2. 

   mikiem2
   Moderator

   Hypothetically, you can modify or delete separate shortcuts when they're there, and I *think* that in some cases where you have 2 .exe files, one with the game's title, the other simply named "Game.exe", that running the game.exe file *might* bypass some of the calls to open web pages etc. If all else fails, Google on something like "modify .exe file" w/out quotes, and you get hits to apps that let you modify some of the resources in an .exe file. It's been MANY years since I've used one of those apps, but back then editing .exe files worked a bit over 1/2 the time. Assuming that the address to whatever web site or page was a simple string value, it shouldn't be hard to try & change that string to your local page.

   Posted 4 years ago #
3. 

   Dragonlair
   Member

   I don't want to change the executable I'm using. I've got it where it calls "play.url" and it opens with my homepage. I just basically want a null url. A URL that doesn't open anything!

   Posted 4 years ago #
4. 

   mikiem2
   Moderator

   Can you break something? Can you change it so it calls a file with an extension that's not associated with any app, e.g. play.urz? Or what would happen if you un-associated the .url extension from the Windows default web browser?

   Posted 4 years ago #
5. 

   Dragonlair
   Member

   Actually, I found a solution to the issue! I was thinking about it when I found another old game today and thinking that even an error message would be better than what I was doing (opening Firefox to my personal home page).

   All I did was make a 0 byte file in notepad. I used the name "play" and let it set the ".txt". I then renamed it from play.txt to play.url. I knew there was going to be a warning message about making the file unusable if I changed the extension but I let it go.

   I copied that into place. The game terminates, calls "play.url" and then bombs with a message that "" is not a valid target! I still have one extra mouse-click (to get past the error message) but no browser is opened.

   It almost exactly what I wanted!

   BTW - there are still a few that open the browser to the distributor's site but I can't stop them. Some old games (mainly from GameTop.com) insert that call IN the game executable and there's not a darn thing I can do about it unless I want to get into the .exe and that I do NOT want to do!

   Posted 4 years ago #
6. 

   Tiffany
   Member

   When I download a game, I never use the games link to play as this would always open a browser at the end. If the game has it, I go into the games file and find engine.exe and shortcut that to my desktop and use that.

   Posted 4 years ago #
7. 

   Dragonlair
   Member

   I do the same thing. I also remove a lot of garbage that is downloaded unrelated to what is needed for the game or even it's license. The worst is MyPlayCity which went from a few hundred K of garbage back around 2010 or before to about 28-30 MB for EVERY game. That doesn't sound like much for one game but it does add up! It's about 27 files and one folder at the latest count. Much of the garbage is extra .ico files for totally unrelated games that MPC is just trying to get you to try and play online!

   There are some older games that force you to open their site at the end. It's in the .exe itself and there's just nothing you can do other than take your chances and try to change the .exe file!

   If these companies change it so you cannot avoid such problems, I'll just stop using them. I have the downloads saved as a backup so I don't need to download them for each install.

   Posted 4 years ago #

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