Unprotecting The Colonel's Bequest   by Independent (IND)

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!