Maybe you should try it and let us know. It's definitely not a virus. You can always scan it before running. I'm enjoying this game from my Ryzen. Live in your scared world. I just figured I'd share a working solution and someone is already afraid it's a virus.

This world we live in...

This is great news, if it's real.
I have a 4790k but if this works, I don't have to worry about upgrading anymore then.

The patcher works at least. It has a minimal gui and offers to automatically make a backup of the main saboteur executable before modifying it. Just point it at the executable and away you go.

Not sure how the change works exactly, like how it enables the game to work with >4 physical cores when it's apparently a "deep rooted issue" within the game or whatever, but compared to the original exe, the patcher modifies a single hex value at offset 009F56D0; which is changed from 76 to EB. This seems to be the only alteration made.

Using an i7 5930k with all cores enabled + HT, and the game actually properly starts now and seems to work fine. Time will tell if I can actually play through the game without any weirdness, but if it at least runs, then that's one problem out of the way.

Not working for me, though I did point it in the right direction, do have the back up, and so on.
Still the same old problem.

Windows 10
NVdia Geforce 1080
I7 6700k

Same here, works on my i7 5930k too. Seems to run fine. GOG should include this fix by default. :)

A 6700k is a quad core. It should run the game out of the box.

I don't have a link to the discussion with JackFuste because it happened via private messages on that forum.

However, he mentioned that there wasn't enough RAM created to store information about more than four cores, so he skipped that step entirely by skipping the CPU detection part. Just jumped over it / nulled it.

Problem solved. He had me analyze why it wasn't starting in OllyDebugger, and lo and behold, we now have a fix.

Maybe it should. But it does not.
It never went to the menu. It launches then closes down immediatly.

With some trepidation I download the "already patched saboteur.exe" from above

(i.e., Saboteur_Fix.7z (mega.nz/#!gA1mBZLR!qr7lUxuaNJr_-Ietgw9ARxZ_4j7_TRUp6UFdaNcf95M) - already patched Saboteur.exe)

It was the exact same size (in bytes) as my existing saboteur.exe from GOG. I then scanned the patched one with two different security programs and they didn't find anything. Then I used CompareIt to compare the two files. As mentioned above there is just the one byte difference.

So crossing my fingers I ran it and ... it works! It runs really well on my 12 core system.

how did you download it, I'm not seeing a link and googling it comes up zilch

Just copy and paste mega.nz/#!gA1mBZLR!qr7lUxuaNJr_-Ietgw9ARxZ_4j7_TRUp6UFdaNcf95M into a browser address bar.

I can confirm that the patched Saboteur.exe and the original Saboteur.exe differ at only one byte value. I just checked myself with HxD.

The value is at address 0x9F56D0 in the file and the value of the byte is changed from 0x76 to 0xEB.

And I can also confirm that this works for me as well with all cores of my CPU enabled.
CPU: Core i7 5930K,
OS: Windows 10 x64 (build 1703, all updates), NVidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB.

It's such a relief too, since I had set my BIOS to disable 2 out of the 6 cores of my CPU in order to run this game, a few months ago, and I had forgot I was still using my PC with that configuration.

Thank you to own3mall and I guess, JackFuste.

Ideally JackFuste would get in touch with GOG to explain how he resolved this.

I think a lot of people will be skeptical to try an unofficial patch that is distributed from mega.nz, and it's really a shame, because this time, this fix actually works!

Edit: I guess one could try to just do the switch of the byte as I explain above. You really need a hex editor like HxD and you should be good to go!

So, the "deeply rooted" problem was just one byte?! :-D That's killing me!

thank you!