Unprotect for Sons of Liberty   by Independent (IND)

Deprotect for SONS OF LIBERTY by Strategic Simulations 1988 Surely, this must be the most redundant passive protection scheme seen so far. This game is of such massive complexity that it boggles the mind! It is absolutely impossible to play the game without the documentation -- well 'nigh impossible for some of us to do well at it even with the docs! Then to have a pas- sive protection system that tests us to make sure we have a legitimate instruction manual is adding insult to injury! Actually this was one of the first passive protection schemes I had the misfortune to come across about a year ago. At the time I solved it out of curiousity and thought, "Wow, this stupid system will never catch on, it's too easy!" Sigh! Anyway the first thing I found was that (using PCtools EDIT) all the (21) paragraphs used for questions were stored in plain ASCII in the 1st half of Relative Sector 165 of the file START.EXE. Well, I figured maybe the corresponding Data Table wasn't too far away either and sure enough there it was on the second half of Relative sector 166 (beginning right after the ASCII word "ABORT". The 21 words were encrypted -- I think they were ANDed with 64h -- but I may have forgotten exactly. Anyhow they can be recognized by their irregular length (from "the" to "recconnaisance") and using "00" or "00 00" separators. If you have your manual handy and a table of normal ASCII characters it should be an interesting exercise to decode the 21 codewords used. Remember to make a diskcopy version of the game to perform the following patches on -- JUST IN CASE! Your task is to block out the entire test word area with "00"s. In Relative Sector 166 of Start.EXE from Displacement 0095 to Displacement 01D9. Or for you folks reading the right hand side of the screen from just after the word "ABORT" to just before the ASCII letters: " A) B)". Write it back to the disk and you're done. Now when you run START.EXE it will prompt you for a para- graph as it did before. Just hit return. It will repeat the request three times. Hit return each time and then you go on into the program. --- The Reno Cracker Apr 89 →→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→