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[The Fifth Horseman]

PROTEGER.COM contains another executable wrapped in it - EVMOVE.COM, which is associated with the Everlock copy protection scheme.

Found this: http://www.searchlores.org/protec/everlock.htm

[UnconformistSheep]

Originally Posted by The Fifth Horseman

PROTEGER.COM contains another executable wrapped in it - EVMOVE.COM, which is associated with the Everlock copy protection scheme.

Again, I did get errors while copying both disk #5, so the page you referenced makes a lot of sense. I couldn't tell what to do (if anything I could do) to crack the protection system.

If anyone would like to accompany me in the process, I will follow your commands. ;-) I have a computer here with a floppy driver, and I recently managed to install Windows 7 on it, so I can try whatever you guys want. (If there is a hacker around, I can also buy you this cheap $1.00 ebay copy, which is probably also "protected".) Anyhow, it probably makes more sense to just buy the game from ebay (if still in its unprotected state): interestingly, there are CD-ROM versions of the "Mario is Missing" game in ebay too.

[UnconformistSheep]

Here are image disks for Mario's Time Machine (pt) using WinImage: floppy disk images.

As you can see, just looking at the file size, there is something wrong with disk #5.

[UnconformistSheep]

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