oh hey that's fun. this game has two layers of copy protection! if I hack the "check weird sector" code to always return 0 (for found-it), it tells me "Diskette/version out of phase"

they call the copy protection on two different sectors, and throw the out-of-phase error if they give the same result, I think

so you can't just overwrite check_copyprotection_sector with return 0

oh god they overwrite the DOS interrupt 1E in the middle, to make DOS think it's a different kind of floppy disk.

okay I now know HOW to crack the game, I just gotta write the x86 assembly.

normal people don't do this. normal people don't write 16bit DOS assembly in 2025.

I have 37 bytes. this won't be hard

and... it doesn't work.
tertiary copy protection?

I think they might be depending on the value of the weird sector elsewhere. like they're loading it SOMEWHERE, maybe they overwrite some code?

THEY CHECKSUM THE FIRST 16KB OF EXECUTABLE RAM?

I patched the EXE to have the right value, but then they checksum it, and now the value is wrong!

insert pop-team-epic "you are motherfucker" here

they checksum memory MORE THAN ONCE!?