Bypassing a Clever CD-Check

Summary

Bypassing a clever CD-check I have an old reference CD that I've been wanting to use without an external drive and the actual disk. However, the application won't launch without the CD: Sometime last year, I wondered if I could figure out how to bypass the CD presence check. After a few attempts at decompiling the application, I finally found the key function: public class Start { public static void main(String[] paramArrayOfString) { if (paramArrayOfString.length == 2 && paramArrayOfString[0].equals("Invalid") && paramArrayOfString[1].equals("class")) { fu.main(new String[] { "none" }); return; } Object object = new Object(); BorderLayout borderLayout = new BorderLayout(30, 30); Frame frame; (frame = new Frame("Application")).setLayout(borderLayout); frame.add(new Label(" Application - loading...")); Toolkit toolkit; Dimension dimension = (toolkit = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit()).getScreenSize(); frame.setLocation(dimension.width / 2 - 80, dimension.height / 2 - 40); frame.pack(); frame.setVisible(true); synchronized (object) { try { object.wait(3000L); } catch (InterruptedException interruptedException) {} } JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "Cannot open [redacted].\nPlease ensure the CD-ROM is inserted."); System.exit(1); } } The application is simply checking that it's invoked with the arguments "Invalid class". If yes, then it starts the real entrypoint in fu.main; if no, it waits three seconds to pretend that it's working, then shows the error message! The application launcher provides the secret arguments. In the Windows version, the launcher is obfuscated and I wasn't able to make sense of it when decompiled. (I believe it also does more sophisticated CD presence checks before launching the program.) I discovered the code above when I finally thought to look at the macOS launcher, which was simply a shell script that invoked the program with the right arguments. Some testing showed that everything works perfectly on Linux, so I made a .desktop file that invo...