This guide shows how to download and run Need for Speed Heat on Windows 7 or Windows 8, by patching Origin to disable its operating system check.
If this works for you, I’d appreciate if you bought me a coffee.
Prerequisites
Get a hex editor that can handle big files. I’m using HxD (Portable).
Check your Origin.exe version:
- For 10.5.66.38849, this revision should work
- For 10.5.64.37936, see previous revision
- For 10.5.63.37653, see previous revision
- For 10.5.60.37244, see previous revision
- For 10.5.57.35162, see previous revision
- For 10.5.56.33908, see previous revision
- For 10.5.55.33574, see previous revision
- For 10.5.52.32372, see previous revision
If the most recent version is missing, please check the comments; if nobody has commented about it yet, please let me know.
Alternatively, you can try the advanced patching guide that should work on any version, but the advanced guide is a lot more involved and there be dragons.
I recommend switching Origin to offline mode, because if the game needs an update, you will have to do this again.
Edits
Open each file in the hex editor. Go to each offset, make sure the sequence of bytes at that offset is the same as what’s in the Old column, change it to what’s in the New column.
In HxD, use Search - Go to… (Ctrl+G), paste in the offset, click OK, make sure your cursor is inside the hex section and not the decoded text section, and type in the new hex values. You can copy the hex values and overwrite them in HxD using Ctrl+B.
Origin.exe
| Offset | Old | New |
|---|---|---|
| 1FE60 | 75 | EB |
| 1FED1 | 75 | EB |
| 1FF3B | 0F 85 92 00 00 00 | E9 93 00 00 00 90 |
| 1FF8A | 75 | EB |
| 29C30 | 0F 8F 07 01 00 00 | E9 08 01 00 00 90 |
| 29D3F | 74 | EB |
OriginClient.dll
| Offset | Old | New |
|---|---|---|
| 3894B5 | 0F 84 37 01 00 00 | E9 38 01 00 00 90 |
| 38963A | 0F 84 4B 01 00 00 | E9 4C 01 00 00 90 |
OriginClientService.exe
| Offset | Old | New |
|---|---|---|
| 2E1AF | 75 | EB |
| 42ABC | 0F 85 93 00 00 00 | E9 94 00 00 00 90 |
Explanation
If you want a very brief explanation, hex 74/75 are conditional jumps, and we turn them into EB, which is a forced jump, to skip over a bunch of code. Sequences 0F 8x are generally variants of jumps that can jump further, and their forced jump equivalent is E9 which takes 1 byte less, so whatever follows after the jump destination (4 bytes) is turned into 90, a no-op instruction that does nothing but prevents shifting everything by a byte.
In all cases, we skip over code that either acts upon the result of an OS version check, or the result of a signature check. Most of it is signature checks that throw a fit (technical term) when one of the exe/dll files is modified. It’s so effective that you need to modify 3 files instead of 1 to get this working (although it’s probably a good idea to be validating exe files because parts of Origin run with SYSTEM level privileges, more privileged than your poweruser administrator account).
HxD also has a handy Data Inspector panel where, if you select one or more bytes, you can see the x86-64 instruction it represents.