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Questions regarding Pirates! PC Booter and DOSBox

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First post, by osofaux

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After a couple years of lurking here I've finally come up with a problem that the search feature couldn't help me find a solution for, thus my first post here in the forums. My questions have to do with the original Sid Meier's Pirates! game from 1987.

I prefer to install or run in DOSBox only those games I have bought and installed from my own personal copy. I'm not completely religious about this but I'd say about 90% of the games I play under DOSBox are this way.

Just a few days ago I got a nice boxed copy of the original Pirates! on 3.5 inch floppy. I have tested this floppy (a PC Booter) on my own 486 machine, and the game plays just fine. I would like to play the game under DOSBox, but I am unsure how to get from here to there, as the disk appears to have some physical copy protection that the game looks for during play to verify it is not a copy. This is my guess, at least, because the IMG file I managed to create and boot DOSBox from hangs where the game begins - after asking whether the graphics are EGA/CGA or Tandy.

If DOSBox cannot boot from a physical floppy, and the IMG format cannot account for various physical copy protection schemes used in floppy disks, am I correct in thinking it is essentially impossible to play a legit copy of Pirates! under DOSBox, or am I missing something obvious?

Please tell me I am missing something obvious. 😀 I am using DOSBox .73

Thanks very much.

PS... was there ever a version of this game for PC that wasn't a booter? A DOS version that installed from a floppy or CD-ROM perhaps?

Reply 2 of 6, by ripsaw8080

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In most cases where there is some physical copy protection of a game on floppy (damaged areas, "weak bits", etc.) a crack is necessary to play the game in DOSBox. There is a cracked version of the Pirates! booter that didn't work in DOSBox, and a fix was made in current SVN, which is probably what DosFreak is thinking of, but that fix will not help an un-cracked version of the game.

I don't think there was a DOS-based version of Pirates! that was essentially the same game as the booter, at least not an official one; but there was the Pirates! Gold remake that was released several years later, and it's DOS-based.

Reply 4 of 6, by ripsaw8080

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You might have to use the Internet Archive for that, but maybe the site is just less stable now and hasn't been available the few times I've checked.

IIRC, there was a DOS-conversion on Retrograde, but it used some "floppy emulator" code combined with cracked disk images, so definitely not an official DOS-based version.

Reply 6 of 6, by osofaux

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Thank you very much for the replies. Although I just got the 3.5 inch copy boxed, I've had an old 'book' style package with 5.25" floppies for years now, but no 5.25" drive to use them with... so I didn't feel too bad when I went to retrograde station a year or two back and downloaded his DOS conversion and the two IMG files there (which I assume he fixed as well.) I still have them in fact - but I never got them to work properly under DOSBox. I thought perhaps buying an original 3.5" copy would allow me some options using a usb floppy drive, but oh well... at least I have some answers now. 😀

I will try retrograde's DOS conversion again with the latest build and see how that goes. It does look like the site is down, which is a real shame... unless it moved somewhere? Thank you all again for the responses.

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