December 23, 1989

Unprotecting The Colonel's Bequest
       by The Lonestar


The Colonel's Bequest by Sierra is a very interesting game and somewhat
unusual for Sierra. The game is not so much a quest, but rather it is
more like interactive fiction with graphics. Like all of the new Sierra
releases it has superb graphics and excellent support for external sound
devices. It does have one irritating feature, it requires the user to
identify a finger print correctly each time the game is played. The game
comes packaged with a game map. On the back of this map the fingerprints
of the principal characters are obscured with a red inked pattern. A red
plastic lensed "magnifying glass" is also included to help identify the
correct fingerprint. I think that we can dispense with that annoying bit
of code and increase the overall enjoyment of this fine game.

Using PCTools, Norton, etc... search for the following bytes in a file
named SCIV.EXE:
    A8 01 74 0A

We are going to replace these bytes and the subsequent bytes with:
    C7 06 1B 00 6C 03 8C 1E 1D 00 FF 1E 1B 00 EB 07

This will set us up for a jump to a hopefully unused portion of SCIV.EXE
where we will edit in our own version of the DOC protect code.

Write the previous sector back out and search for the following bytes:
    59 6F 75 20 74

What you will see is a section of ASCII text used for reporting errors to
the user. We will borrow one of these error messages to insert our code.

Replace the bytes we searched for and the subsequent bytes with:
    A8 01 74 0A AC 32 E4 8B C8 AC 32 E4 EB 04 AD 8B C8
    AD 8B D8 AC 32 E4 81 FE 97 98 75 03 BE 9A 9E CB

Write this sector back out and The Colonel's Bequest is unprotected.

From this point on when the game is run, press ENTER when you see the
fingerprint check and the game will continue as if you had selected the
correct one.

I would have rather skipped the fingerprint check intirely, but this is
the best I could do. I'll leave that to a better cracker.

ENJOY!