Message has been sent

Agathosdaimon wrote on 2020-11-03, 06:27:

well when i made the disk image - what also showed up onthe diskimage were a bunch of strange files titled weirdly, i cant even figure out how to recreate the dashes there are using, - they come as looking ing ::M File (the colons though are more like vertical lines than dots) - so there are clearly hidden files on the disk, as these are not visible when i just look at the A drive in windows explorer

Okay, but a disk image is literally a byte-by-byte copy of whatever is on the disk, regardless of whether DOS or Windows Explorer can make any sense of those bytes. Even if the installer uses a check that bypasses the filesystem, it shouldn't matter if you're working with an image. (There are ways of subverting disk-imagers, of course, like "fuzzy bytes" - but those are unreliable and also uncommon.)

One of the stranger methods of copy protection I've encountered is used by Lemmings 2, which looks at the hard drive boot sector when it is installed and fails when it is used with a FAT32 partition - but it seems unlikely something like that would be used more than once.

Cracked by Jrok in Europe, and he dictated the patch to me over the
phone. 3 bytes.."

Well, if you really want to go that way, I suggest getting FrHed from http://frhed.sourceforge.net/en/ . Open the cracked .exe, then go to Edit->"Compare from current offset..." and open the non-cracked .exe. That will tell you what bytes are different. Perhaps the three bytes in question will be conveniently isolated from whatever other changes may be present.

Jorpho wrote on 2020-11-03, 16:08:

Okay, but a disk image is literally a byte-by-byte copy of whatever is on the disk, regardless of whether DOS or Windows

Unless you use special software, you do not get an exact copy. And I'm not even sure if all copy protection schemes are supported when you do. Let alone be usable in dosbox 🤔

held wrote on 2020-11-03, 17:57:

Unless you use special software, you do not get an exact copy.

Did you have an example in mind? These things don't come up very often. As I said, there are things like fuzzy bytes (or fuzzy bits, rather), but those are uncommon.

You found a game for the Sound Driver Pack
Added you to the credit list.

2020-11-03 Added: Kick Off 2 (1990) to CT-VOICE.DRV game list, credit Agathosdaimon

Jorpho wrote on 2020-11-03, 19:32:

held wrote on 2020-11-03, 17:57:

Unless you use special software, you do not get an exact copy.

Did you have an example in mind? These things don't come up very often. As I said, there are things like fuzzy bytes (or fuzzy bits, rather), but those are uncommon.

IIRC, a lot of 80's games had keydisk protections, special tracks, additional tracks.
MicroProse, Sierra, Titus, Taito just to name a few.

I remember copy2pc and teledisk, but there was so much more out there.