Heartner Hearts! help

[Mystician]

After torrenting and downloading from the huge torrent then installing, opening the hh application won't start up

[Cheremonda]

Hey Mystician, what operating system are you running (e.g. Windows Vista/7/8/10, Mac, Linux, etc)? Have you tried setting the locale/region to Japanese and then seeing if the game opens?
It looks like the game was made in 2006, so you could also try to run it in compatibility mode if you have a later Windows version.

[Mystician]

Thanks for the reply, I'm using Windows 10 and Japanese locale and have also tried running compatibility mode but they didn't do much

[Cheremonda]

This game has DRM. :/
It doesn't play if you don't have the CD disks inserted, and it relies on SafeDisc, which is not supported in Win10 due to security vulnerabilities (so even with the disks inserted, it throws an error).
This would technically be something that requires a no-cd patch, but I don't know how to make one (and I have been trying, but I don't really know how to modify/read assembly, so it's not working).

++
For reference, this was what I did:

I downloaded the torrent files for Heartner Hearts and saw that two of the folders had cd disk images (.img).

I used WinCDEmu to mount them.
The portable version of WinCDEmu can be downloaded at
https://wincdemu.sysprogs.org/portable/

The game requires both disks to install the game.
0) Changed the locale in Windows for non-Unicode programs to Japan.
1) Mounted the "HH.img" file from both the "HH GAME" folder and "HH INST" folder.
2) Once the files were mounted, ran the "AutoRun.exe" from the mounted HH.img disk of the "HH INST" folder and chose to install the game (first option if the game isn't already installed).
3) Picked where to install the game
4) The installer later prompted for the location of the second disk, so found the mounted HH.img disk of the "HH GAME" folder, selected the "haha" folder on that disk, and proceeded with the install.
4) The last step prompted for online user registration, but the checkbox seemed to be optional.
5) All of this was for nothing because of outdated DRM.

++
You might have some luck if you try a virtual machine running an earlier Windows operating system (that isn't Windows 10), but I don't know if it's worth it.

Another option is to buy it on DLsite and play it with their in-browser game player.
DLsite's download for this game also uses DRM (called PlayDRM).

++
While doing all of this, I extracted the game's opening movie, if you want to watch it.
https://mega.nz/file/a1Ig1TqT#-7wGF1...F-wCn0iZ6TfYFk