An MS-DOS 3.30 with Dongle Protection! \ VOGONS

An MS-DOS 3.30 with Dongle Protection!

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First post, by fargo

Posted on 2021-06-06, 03:18

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Microsoft cooperated with a Canadian company in 1987 to release a localized version of MS-DOS 3.30 (Arabic). The operating system supports MDF and CGA cards with Arabic ROM fonts. It can also load fonts into memory for Hercules+, EGA and VGA cards.

An archived copy can be found here: https://archive.org/details/msdos-330-ar . This copy doesn't boot. It displays an error message saying "Security Device failure" as it needs a parallel-port dongle.

I compared the files with a regular DOS 3.30 (English) and found that protection was implemented in IO.SYS file. Replacing the IO.SYS file with one from the regular DOS version allows the localized OS to boot, but breaks the locatiolizaion features such as changing charset and loading fonts.

I tried tracing the IO.SYS execution while booting, using QEMU and GDB, but couldn't figure out how to bypass the dongle protection.

Reply 1 of 6, by Jo22

Posted on 2021-06-06, 03:39

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Whoah! That's an awesome find! 😁 These dongles apparently were very common in the 80s/early 90s.
Ironically, they motivated pirates even more to "fix" software using it.
Software companies never learned, it seems.
I'm really curious, too how the mechanism works. Just a bunch of diodes/resistors? a flip-flop? an EPROM? a microcontroller?

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Reply 2 of 6, by fargo

Posted on 2021-06-06, 04:19

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Yes, it's interested for sure 😄

Here is more info about it: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23060647

Reply 3 of 6, by Caluser2000

Posted on 2021-06-06, 04:42

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Here is the thread Fargo started over at the vcfed forums- https://www.vcfed.org/forum/forum/technical-s … rotected-ms-dos

My understanding is that dongles were primarily used in high end applications, such as Art Works for RiscOS like this one:

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Reply 4 of 6, by kokoboi

Posted on 52 minutes ago

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Using AI, managed to reverse the dongle encryption and simulate it

Reply 5 of 6, by fargo

Posted on 44 minutes ago

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kokoboi wrote on 52 minutes ago:

Using AI, managed to reverse the dongle encryption and simulate it

Wow! This is fantastic news! I hope you can share your method and post the unprotected copy to the Internet Archive.

Reply 6 of 6, by Grzyb

Posted on 31 minutes ago

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Back in the era, that was mentioned in "Programmer's Technical Reference for MSDOS and the IBM PC" - http://www.o3one.org/hwdocs/bios_doc/dosref22.html

According to PC Week Magazine, July 4, 1988, Arabic versions of MSDOS are shipping with a hardware copy-protection system from R […]
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According to PC Week Magazine, July 4, 1988, Arabic versions of MSDOS are
shipping with a hardware copy-protection system from Rainbow Technologies.
This is similar to the short-lived system used by AutoCAD 2.52 and a very few
other MSDOS programs, where an adapter block is plugged into the parallel port
and software makes use of coded bytes within the block. This type of copy
protection has been common on Commodore products for several years, where it is
called a "dongle."
The AutoCAD dongle was defeated by a small program written within weeks of
version 2.52's debut. Version 2.62 was released 3 months later, without the
dongle. The DOS dongle will, however, prevent the system from booting at all
unless it is found.
This makes the Arabic version of MSDOS the first copy-protected operating
system, a dubious distinction at best. The modifications to the operating
system to support the dongle are not known at this time. Frankly, it would
seem that burning the operating system into ROMs would be cheaper and simpler.

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