Unprotect for Sons of Liberty by Independent (IND)
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the reno cracker
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Last modified Apr 2, 1989 11:25:20 AM
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Download SOL-UNP.TXT
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1989 April 2
- Text / Guides and how-tos
- The Reno Cracker, writer credits
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
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