CREEPYPASTA

Unknown Format

  Dear Nick,

Remember last month, how you let me rip your game collection, before your family moved? First of all, thanks. You've always been a really awesome friend. Now, I'm not really sure how to start this, but I don't think we're going to get to talk too much after this. Some important stuff is about to happen, and I don't know if I'll get another chance to talk before that. I just wanted to let you know what's happening from me, before you started hearing about it from everybody else. You know how Steve and Chris like to twist things around.

I guess the best way to start this is right from the beginning. After you left your games with me, I started trying to rip them right away. Daemontools and Alcohol had trouble with the copy protection on a few, though. I tried looking on forums for workarounds for an hour or two, but no dice. Couldn't get 'em to work. Finally got fed up, and went to look and see if there were any programs that worked better. Most of what I turned up was stuff you and me tried and didn't work, or that you had to shell out three hundred dollars and let them put a keylogger on your machine to ensure you didn't misuse it. You search the same sites as me, you know the ones.

Anyway, I finally turned up something on this obscure torrent site. I've gotten a couple things from them before, but it's pretty much "Ye Olde Site of Desperation"...heh, remember that site? Yeah. The guy who posted it looked like he'd put the description through Google translate. What it was, was some Japanese program, "Shikami no Tengen". The guy said the name meant "Four Gods in Heaven". Probably not, though. I think his Japanese was probably as good as his English. What he claimed, though, was that it could get around any copy protection, and rip the disks as smaller files than any other program. If I know you, you're rolling your eyes SO hard right now.

Thing is, I looked at the reviews, and it seemed totally legit. A bunch of people gave it high marks, and were praising this guy for uploading the program. It had a good amount of seeds, even. I mean, sure, there were people complaining that it frakked their computer, or that every file they made came out messed up, but you see that on any torrent, right? They all got the usual, "Read the damn instructions, noob." replies, so I figured it was good to go, and started downloading. In no time at all, I was ready to install it.

The directions with the file were pretty straightforward. Switch the computer to Japanese unicode, run the installer, switch back to English and apply a crack to make it work. It didn't take long. The installer was supposed to show pictures and play music while it ran, I think, but the images were broken and just did a slideshow of solid color screens. The "music" just came out as static, and I turned off my speakers until it was done. I was a little worried it wasn't going to work, but it had all those positive ratings, so I gave it a chance. Sure enough, once I went through all the steps, it ran fine. Simple interface, pretty easy to use. The only thing was a warning that came in the readme file: FILES WILL BE IN UNKNOWN FORMAT. RENAME .iso AND MOUNT EXTERNAL. DO NOT TRY TO RUN.

That's literally a copy and paste of the warning. Made sense to me, though. The program was Japanese, patched to work in English. I figured that probably messed up the file extensions. I tried it with Civ 4 and that obscure as hell shooter you're so proud of, though, and it worked fine. Heck, it really was as good as they said. Really did even make the files smaller. The only thing was the file extension. It came out as "(NAME).4" for both games. When I switched them to iso files and mounted them through Daemontools, though, they worked. Absolutely flawless. No errors or copy fail that I could see. So I did the rest of them. It took a while, and I got tired, but you know that I had them back to you the next day.

I've had a lot of good times with those games. Played the hell out of Hellgate. Reaffirmed that I'll never be a pro at Starcraft 2. Completely forgot that Skyrim had a main quest. All the kinds of stuff we used to do on gaming nights when you were here. (I totally platonic miss you, bro.) So, eventually I worked my way through the files and found a couple I'd forgot to rename. I must have been tired. Just for the hell of it, I decided to see what would happen if I tried to run Portal 2 as a .4 and see what would happen. I figured I'd just get the usual Windows error for when you use an unrecognised extension, but no. It came up with an error message in Japanese that I couldn't read. Well, that got me thinking. If it popped that up, it must be able to read the file. Maybe I could switch the computer into Japanese again, and it would work? I decided to try, and surprisingly it worked. Not only did it work, but the file ran just like it had been mounted to the virtual drive.