This was a protection system that was on the Titus games released from France. I always got them from Funakashi in a TeleDisk file, and had to unpack them to a floppy and go from there.
Eric is obviously the programmer of the protection, and in most cases also the programmer of the game that the protection was on. In the latter releases it had become quite nasty, that's why I was glad to have gotten in early. Here's the story:
The "Best Protection Kit" was released in stages. It was almost like Eric didn't really have the time to devote to getting it all worked out the FIRST time, so he implemented pieces along the way. The way that this protection worked was it had a small .com loader that performed the disk check, and then if it passed, it loaded and executed the game's .exe. Simple enough in theory. The problem was, his loader was encrypted, and had all kinds of nasty anti-debug tricks in it to try to stop me from doing what I wanted to do. And the game's .exe was packed with his custom packer which produced an .SQZ file. In the early days, his encryption was relatively weak, so I unencrypted the whole loader, and found the code that unpacked the .SQZ file in memory, and then jumped to it. I pulled the decompression code out, and made a stand-alone program that would load, unpack, and save the .SQZ files back to the HD in bare .exe format.
So, when a new Titus game came out, I deleted the .com loader, and ran the tool that Eric had helped me to make, on his .SQZ file, and I had a working version of the game, with no protection.
He never figured this out, and all the way up to the last Titus game that I saw, my tool worked like a charm.
Funny comment. JROK had a go at one of his protections back circa '90 or so, and referred to him as Eric "How do I love me" Zmiro.
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5 comments:
I remember when I crack his protection on Prehistorik.
It was so fun to crack it. I did it with "debug.com" waiting for the good code was decoded on memory and writing it down to disk from debug.
Did you try to do a:
c:\> type preh.com
I'm sure you did!
I remember changing the text from "Best protection by E Zmiro" to "Best crack by Troll section".
I love your blog cause I also cracked tons of games from zx spectrums, amstrads and MSDos.
What great times!
Nice Job ! i've never spend lot of time for a protection, and i was the only one who spend time for that a Titus...
But, If I remember well, removing the loader wasn't enough to have a "unprotected" disk. The game test, at some specific time, the data INSIDE the controler. And the game finish to crash at spécific level, near the end.
ez at consultant dot com
Eric, I know nothing checked in Prehistorik, as I played it all the way through, because I LIKED it.
You guys did a GREAT job on that game.
As a sidenote, it's been almost 20 years, and I've still not seen a complaint that ANY of my Titus cracks didn't work.
Hey,
I am from Pakistan. In Pakistan we have really huge piracy market, I remember using your few cracked arcade games in 90s, it was super fun to get cracked games, thx alot for your time on cracking oldshool games:)
Haroon
Hey Fabulous Furlough,
I recently started playing with reverse engineering one aspect of Prehistorik 2 and I'd like to contact you regarding the tools you mention in the article but I don't see your email address anywhere. Can you post your email address here? Alternatively send me an email to prehistorik2fan@gmail.com. I'm interested in the unpacker you mention.
Eric, is this email address still valid? ez at consultant dot com
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