Replacement for FakeDate

[Alex S.]

The other day I realized that it would be great to have a utility like FakeDate that allows the user to set an arbitrary date. Why? Because I collect prerelease versions of games of course! One tool to set any "fake date" you want felt like something I'd find useful. I wrote my own from scratch. This is 100% pure oldschool 16-bit real-mode DOS, written by hand in QuickBasic 7.5 on a real DOS machine. Requres DOS 5 and a 386 or better. It's about 14 KB compiled.

 

I tested this with Doom press release, Hexen retail store beta and a few other time-limited games. Works fine on my machines.

[Doomkid]

That’s really cool! Would you mind posting a zip or such with the tool included (if it’s ready that is)?

[Alex S.]

Just now, Doomkid said:

That’s really cool! Would you mind posting a zip or such with the tool included (if it’s ready that is)?

Sure, I'd love to share it. Is it OK to just do that as an attachment to the original post? Or should I put the archive somewhere else?

[Doomkid]

You can attach it to your post directly! if you prefer something like MediaFire or DropBox will work as well.

[Alex S.]

Attached ZIP archive with the bare EXE. Feel free to test it out in DOSBox :)

DATER.EXE.zip

[Alex S.]

So far, I've tested this with the Doom Press Release beta, Heretic wide-area beta and the HeXen Retail Store beta and they work. I would safely assume that because this just sets the hardware clock in a "believably authentic" way, it should work with most things but I'm not sure.