Hello,

I recently got a copy of Shadowgate, the original one from 1987. I never played the game before but doing a little research found out some crazy stories about hidden rooms,etc. Looking forward to play it whenever I have the time (right?).

The thing is, what really got me crazy curious about it is the copy protection. The manual mentions that once the game is installed on the hard drive I wont be able to install it on a different PC, to do that I must uninstall the game from the computer where it's installed, this means you need the disks to install or uninstall the game. This processes obviously write something to the disks, actually to disk 1. Now, since I wanted to preserve the actual state of the disks I made back up images of the two 5.25 disks using WinImage 3.0 in my DOS / win 3.11 486 PC (DX2-66MHz, 16Mb Ram, Sound Blaster Pro, Matrox Millenium 4Mb, blah, blah, blah), also, I made copies of the disks using DiskDupe Pro 7.0.

So, I tried to install the game using my disk copies and it seemed to install it without problems, but the game didn't run, I got some weird characters on the top left of the screen and needed to reboot the PC. I started to wonder if some sort of copy protection was the cause of this since I didn't have problems reading the original disks when doing the backups. Out of curiosity I started the installation using the original disks and I got a different message:

Important: Maximum install count is 170.
After this install, 83 install(s) will be available.
Proceed? (y/n)

I couldn't believe it!! So, I cancelled the installation and started looking online but wasn't able to find anything. I went ahead and downloaded the game from one of those "free" or "abandoned" games sites and ran it on the PC, the game started correctly (there was no installation needed in this case, just copy the files to a folder). At this point I wasn't caring much about the game but the "installation protection" feature, don't know if there is something hidden in the boot sector of the disk, or maybe these hidden files I found on disk 1:

Ibmbio.com
Ibmdos.com

BTW, the installation expects that the 5.25 floppy drive is set as drive "A".

It seems that the game was uninstalled correctly by the previous owner(s) so I will be able to install it from the original disks, but before doing that I wanted to know if someone has more info about this amazing copy protection. I wonder if the install counter can be reseted, that would be nice. Another thing that the manual mentions is that if you run some sort of defragmenting software on your PC, the uninstall process will not work, that's crazy!

Hopefully someone out there can share some light about all this!

Cheers!