[Help needed] Javelin 1.1 EDU French - copy protected

callmejack

I have a french version of Javelin 1.1 Education which is serialized and copy protected.

I would very much appreciate if someone could check if it's possible to make it a workable copy.

https://mega.nz/file/SKJwxDwK#hvdAQPJcCvtFdxWUlWE26mGtkIOzAf9FPwUZSsOYbww

coolhaken

This app seems use Cop's CopyLock II.
No known emulators support it for now.
Looks like the SCP dump is good for me, because it works with a private made DOSBox-TC.
A .psi image may work if you do some manually modification, but this is another kind of "crack" and meaningless.
PCE will never support this keydisk protection type, unless it supports at least some bitstream image format (.mfm, .hfe, .tc, .86f, etc.) in the future.

callmejack

Thanks for the information. It’s unfortunate there’s no emulator supporting it, but it’s good to know the floppy dump is good.

SomeGuy

The approach PCE takes is valid if you think about it from the point of emulating the floppy disk controller chip

The microcontroller chip used on IBM PCs can not access any arbitrary point in the MFM data. It is normally limited to reading a sector. However it can do a "diagnostic" read, which looks for a sector header, reads the sector data, then keeps reading data until the buffer is full. This is what many copy protection schemes use.

You can simulate this in PCE by telling it to include more sector data for each sector.

You can sort of brute force this by using the commands:

pri disk1.pri -s mfm-min-size 8192 -p decode mfm disk1.psi -f -v
psi disk1.psi -e crc-data 0 -e position -1 disk1.psi

to decode a disk image. This includes extra data on all sectors. But ideally, only the sector that the program does a diagnostic read on should have the extra data.

This does make it more problematic to convert such protected images. And there does exist the problem that if the copy protection tries to WRITE to some part of the protect area, and then expects to see a change in the diagnostic read data, that might fail since the data presented to the emulator is a copy and will not change.

I tried that on this image. It gets past the keydisk check, but then hangs at the splash screen for some reason.

Edit: Switched PCE from CGA to Herc or EGA mode and the program runs.

ibmpc5150

One disappointing thing about the PCE emulator is that it does not yet support accessing primary converted PRI image files by reading .MFM files from other emulators.

It is a fact that the author has already taken this into account.
However, since secondary conversion such as PSI still supports almost 99% of disk copy protected games, it is not a big deal.
I think about it.

If PRI images are directly supported by the emulator, there is no need to put effort into secondary conversion.

To be honest, PRI images are not only used for emulators, but their own image files can be edited with the text editing function, and can be converted to Super Card Pro or Kryoflux stream files and used to copy or restore them to a diskette.
In some ways, the advantage of the PRI image is that it is not only an emulation, but also an actual diskette.
I think it serves as a bridgehead to enable exchange.

This is especially true when looking at images dumped with the TransCopy Option Board.
To restore by copying it back to diskette, most people use Copy II PC Deluxe.
I think it is only possible through the Option Board, but conversion to PRI image is possible.
After doing so, you can convert it to Super Card Pro or Kryoflux.

Even now, when I have time, I am converting files that were dumped only to TC in the past to SCP and copying and restoring them to diskette.
​

GloriousCow

@coolhaken , how did you identify this title as using Cop's Copylock II?

coolhaken

Haha, I guessed that. So I used the word "seems".
I knew I am wrong some months ago.