Eric Zmiro's Best Protection Kit

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.