I sometimes play PC games. The only games I am willing to play are DRM-free versions. For many years now, I only purchased PC games from GOG.COM for this very reason.

One of the games I recently acquired is the acclaimed The Saboteur, an open world game that is set in Nazi-occupied Paris.

Unfortunately, I found out that the game refuses to run on modern computers that have CPUs with more than 4 physical cores.

But then, relief: it turns out that there is an embarrassingly trivial patch (a single byte!) that makes The Saboteur playable again on the PC. Given the GOG.COM version of the game, just change the byte at 0x9f56d0 from 0x76 to 0xeb.

That's all. One lousy byte and the game runs again.

Someone even made a nice bash script, which can be run on any Linux system, to patch the executable automatically. Here it is, in its entirety:

#!/bin/bash

# Fixing Saboteur to run on CPUs with more than 4 cores.
# Thanks to jackfuste from WSGF, who found the fix.
# Make sure you have xxd installed

game_dir="$1"
game_binary="${game_dir}/Saboteur.exe"
gog_ver_sha512='d53682d0a0973cd1dfef97d3a2b55204298b89f16ac400e29aebb6b2143903758bbbb15c82de28ef0586dbfac7fb7a407f1c7c547419602ae1e9e0e601262c8e'
patched_sha512='884df371f4ec7c6cc79d5d1e2b37191b01db7e3f66c3ed5621e54f6164b3188b66b82eba833377924388e94a53886290b50613635bc889ae46c4fac2191ad443'
current_sha512=$(sha512sum "$game_binary" | cut -d ' ' -f 1)

if [[ "$current_sha512" == "$patched_sha512" ]]; then
   echo "Game is already patched, nothing to do."
   exit 0
elif [[ "$current_sha512" != "$gog_ver_sha512" ]]; then
   echo "You have incorrect version! Aborting."
   exit 1
fi

echo "Patching..."
echo "9f56d0: eb" | xxd -r - "${game_dir}/Saboteur.exe"

 Beautiful. And it works: The Saboteur now runs fine on my workstation with its 8-core (16 virtual cores) Xeon CPU.