How does the nocd patch work?

Hi all,

I'm trying to get this to run on a university PC, which is trickier than planned. Getting past the display issues without administrator access was a nightmare, but I can actually now - after lots of effort - get it to launch.

It's the 1.0b version, but requires a no-cd patch. I can't apply the UPatch HD file because the admin policy blocks it, and I can't find a way of extracting nocd patch files to see how they work.

Does anyone know how I could manually manipulate the game files to apply a nocd patch? Thanks!