I am thinking about buying Molebox to create my .EXEs and hide my resources. I downloaded the trial and was able to get it to do everything I need - all my resources were packed into a new .EXE, save for acknex.dll. My only hesitation is that it's just about $100 which seems awfully steep. Has anyone bought this and have some feedback to share? Does anyone have a cheaper alternative to suggest?

I need something fairly robust - I want to be able to hide my music, images, code, etc, if necessary. I want to make it as easy as possible for people to use my apps without having to worry about whether it's a trojan/virus, etc.

Anyone? If I lay down $100 and then someone later posts that Molebox is a complete waste of money compared to alternative X, I'll be really sad.

Why not trying the free alternatives first? A quick google search for free exe packer brought up lots of results.

Phoenix Game Protection System:
Updated for v1.1.0.17

Phoenix Game Protection (PGP) is a protective shell for your indie game.When you use PGP to process
and package your game, you can be confident that your hard work and media are soundly protected
against theft.

PGP will keep an honest person honest, a curious person confused and a hacker or programmer busy.

No software based protection system is 100% bulletproof against attacks, but Phoenix is designed from
the ground up to be the best solution for the independant developer.

How it works:

When you first fire up the software, you are presented with a step-labeled user interface. It takes only
four steps to get your game packaged with PGP and secure for distribution to your end-user.

If you have the Standard, Professional, Developer or Enterprise Editions, you have the ability to add up
to 3 videos and 1 looping background audio file to your PGP project.

If you have the Professional, Developer or Enterprise Editions, you have
the ability to require end-user validation (registration) using either Offline or Online validation methods.

When your end-user lanuches your game, PGP starts to work. All windows based utilities lauch as CMD
and Task Manager are blocked to prevent access to your game files while the game is running.

http://www.phoenix-sentry.com/

Cheers

Ozzie

Molebox is pretty good utility, but in some seldom cases it gives an error with DLL unpacking like ‘…DLL not found’. I don’t know why it’s going on.
Recently I used BoxedApp Packer squeezing the same app (and the same DLLs) and everything works properly.
Here is the link: http://boxedapp.com/

Best regards,

ok, but you see the prices?

I bought molebox some time ago for some project I had finished. I have to say it did a perfect job , packed everything into a nice exe and encrypted it. I think you need to leave the dlls outside though , not sure though since I haven't used it for a while , but I can tell you it's worth every penny for what it does and it does it well.

Use Ventilator's super simple filepacker, until TechMuc release his filepacker.
Super simple filepacker by Ventilator

You noticed, that this thread is from 2008?

Molebox is not simply a filepacker with encryption - it is a protection for your game assets. Most model packages Eula require that you protect their models from being extracted from your game.

If you use a filepacker which unpacks the mdl-files into a temporary folder, it might be nice to have a single .exe file only, but you might get into trouble if you sell the program and it is easy to rip the models out of your temp folder.

I use molebox for models, sounds, etc.

How does molebox work?
It redirects file handling system calls to use their own function calls which can handle the encrypted archive. Your program can be limited to only work with files from your archive, and lots of other options can be used to make your program a bit harder to crack.

Yeah, so??