Never heard of it.
It was useful, but becoming less and less so as newer versions of copy protection schemes kept it from working. I guess they either couldn’t keep up (they promised Starforce compatibility, but never delivered), or there’s some behind-the-scenes legal issues.
Found this about Game Jackal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Jackal
Looks like to me a glorified No_cd program that you have to pay for. I could very well be wrong.
Granted, I just don’t see the need to pay for a service that allows me to play different games on my PC and not have to switch disks. I’m lazy, but I love my money.
Looks like the forums are still up, you just have to go directly to them. Not much more information, though.
Well, CRAP! GJ was a must have for me - it was more than a no-CD crack, you applied it to programs you own, it worked perfectly when the games were patched, and the games that I run the most work perfectly with it.
I assume some publisher was threatening them?
Damn. Gamejackal is a great little tool. It’s going to suck having to rely on no-cd cracks again to avoid swapping disks.
That sucks. I love GJ.
GameJackal was simply one of the best value purchases you could make. Removed the need for CDs, didn’t give you all those irritating issues that cracked EXEs do, was regularly updated and worked with pretty much anything non-StarForce, and did all this for a price as close to free as made no odds.
An incredible tool and I will really miss it.
Back to the cracked EXEs then.
Game Jackal was a wonderful piece of software. I hope the source “accidentally” leaks and someone picks up the ball. I guess I better hunt down the latest installer from somewhere in case I need to reinstall some day.
That’s a shame.
Worked very well (everything except Starforce) and kept you from having to put cracked EXEs of unknown origin on your system.
That does totally suck. There’s only about three or four games in my library that don’t like GJ, and two of those are Starforce.
I bet that somebody was finally able to hack the supposedly machine-specific game profiles that GJ created, in order to use for cracks without having GJ (or owning the game in question). Just guessing at this point.
That’s too bad. It was pretty neat.
From the forum:
"Hi all,
Thanks for all the concern regarding our fate. It’s a very sad day for us here at Game Jackal.
While I unfortunately can’t go into any detail, I can tell you that the closure was an internal company decision.
Thank you for all your support over the years."
Translation: “We weren’t making enough money.”
Judging by the amount of activity on their forums this closure really doesn’t surprise me. Still a nifty program though for not having to track down a working no cd crack for a particular game.
It still works, right? It doesn’t phone home or anything, right?
Yes, it still works. Too bad it’s no longer supported, though – any current version will most likely stop working with new copy protection methods pretty soon. :(
If it’s just that they weren’t making enough, I wish they’d tried a subscription
model. I would have paid $10/year for updates. I wonder though, if they weren’t killed by Vista breaking their current technology with its additional OS lock down. Anyone tried it on vista?
It’ll continue working with the current games I have at least, though I’m a little concerned about keeping it in its current state through reinstalls and not having to revert to an older version, since presumably the update servers will go down at some point.
We should be able to apply our license keys against the latest trial version though, so it can’t hurt to grab it while it’s still available.