Phil the Leeds fan
Youth Team
My download attempt history is as follows:-
- Repeatedly tried to download, took all of 1 second and nothing was different.
- Altered the command line for the update program (it thought fifa was in a directory /fifa20~2) changed it to /fifa2002 and it still did the same thing
- Removed the -cdline blablabla bit of the command line, and it sort of worked (told me it would take 20 hours)
- Realised that my fifa game is in a directory /fifa 2002 and not /fifa2002 (space in it) so thought about changing this...
- ...but then realised what it had done when I aborted and didn't want the game to stop working, so I copied the whole game to /fifa2002 giving me 2 copies on my system (useful if the update wipes off my changed files.
- It is now going to take 2 hours and I think this is about right.
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So my theory, finally, is that EA have a copy of the whole game on it's update server, when they change files in this, the update program scans your computer and recognises this is different to your files and replaces them. By removing the -cdline bit, you bypass the security checks (don't hold me to this) and so when the directory was not where I have fifa, it started downloading the whole game (hence 20 hours on a 56K modem).
Assuming all of this is correct, you could get hold of the ea update files from any EA game and using this, download the whole game free from ea (and any other game you like), get a nocd crack from somewhere and play for free.
What do you think??
P.S. Just had another thought, if this theory as to how the update program works is correct, the update would support resumable download as any files downloaded already would be found when your version is compared with EA's version.