As I
mentioned in the other thread, the mario-time-machine disk #5 is probably borked (just look at the size of the image file), but maybe not the where-is-mario disk #5. I could try using a different programme to create the img disk to see if we get better results... (I created them using dd system command from Linux.)
But indeed, there are these two files:
EV31.SYS and
EV32.SYS in disk #5 of both games. The size of the files is identical between games, but the data differs.
It still seem like the protection mechanism is at fault here. Just try to do a
proteger a: c:, and you'll get an error:
Current Available Install Count = 0. (disk #5)
Re-reading the Warning text, and looking at the output of the
proteger command, it seems clear the copy protection mechanism is more sophisticated than shuffling a couple of files around.
More than a counter, I bet those two files encode information about the computer, like the floppy-disk Label, hard-disk Label and etc, otherwise it would be too trivial for the ordinary computer user to piracy the game, by either cloning the original floppy-disk, or by cloning the hard-disk installation.
Interestingly, the "proteger" command is a PROTEGER.COM file. COM executables are known to be easily disassembled (though I have no experience myself), so maybe someone could have a look.
By the way, I renamed the image files to disk*.img to make them easier to mount, and placed the all thing in this zip files:
http://www.alunos.dcc.fc.up.pt/~c060...ario-games.zip