heh! i had that exact same (cracked) game! it didn't hold my interest for very long, though. i could always tell the difference between the companies that roll

heh! i had that exact same (cracked) game! it didn't hold my interest for very long, though. i could always tell the difference between the companies that rolled their own weak-ass protection schemes in-house, and the ones who ponied up for the good stuff, like softguard. the simplest game i ever broke, before i even owned turbo debugger, was the dos version of rampage. all i had to do was NOP out three calls to INT 10h, the bios direct disk interrupt, and it wasn't able to 'see' the corrupted sectors on its copy-protected floppy anymore. in the mildly difficult range was this flight simulator i cracked for a friend. i found the protection function that i wanted to NOP out and wrote down the sequence of bytes that needed to be changed. but when i searched the executable with norton, those bytes weren't found! further exploration revealed that the programmers had applied some weak XOR-style "encryption" to the copy protection routine i was trying to get rid of. i had to write a little utility in C to break that one. i tried to break several of the sierra games, like king's quest. but they were using their own in-house interpreter, so trying to crack it with an 8086 assembler was approaching the problem at the wrong level of abstraction. i couldn't do it. i never did manage to get any of the softguard games, either. they were doing really wicked things like using the INT 1 and INT 3 interrupt vectors as scratch space. they knew perfectly well that people like me needed those interrupts to be intact for our debuggers to work. i tried redirecting the first 100 calls to a different area of memory, but they were really fiendishly thorough. i gave up. bet you've got some good stories, too. hint hint.