AR: Dungeon - uncracked?

[evilmoo]

Does anyone have an uncracked copy of the Dungeon they could give me? I've been putzing around with some reverse engineering and would like to see the original images...

 

Thanks!

[+remowilliams]

These are my original uncracked images. The only issue you may have is that .PRO images do not work in emulators, and the .ATX image seems to crash A800win, though it works correctly on my real hardware here via APE.

AR_Dungeon_originals.zip

[evilmoo]

These are my original uncracked images. The only issue you may have is that .PRO images do not work in emulators, and the .ATX image seems to crash A800win, though it works correctly on my real hardware here via APE.

 

Thank you very much!

[Shamus]

One thing to keep in mind is that the protection utilized fuzzy sectors. Unless that's a VAPI image, you might run into some trouble.

 

How do I know this? I ain't tellin'.

[evilmoo]

One thing to keep in mind is that the protection utilized fuzzy sectors. Unless that's a VAPI image, you might run into some trouble.

 

How do I know this? I ain't tellin'.

 

Seriously, this stuff is 20 years old. Now is not the time to behave like a snotty teenager with your "I know something you don't know" attitude.

[Shamus]

I'm only being partly tounge-in-cheek--I know about this stuff but I don't feel comfortable in divulging the details. If I didn't live in one of the most litigious societies in the world, I could speak more freely about such things.

 

Sorry if that came across as snotty-teenager-nyah-nyah-nyah! That isn't the way it was meant.

[+remowilliams]

One thing to keep in mind is that the protection utilized fuzzy sectors. Unless that's a VAPI image, you might run into some trouble.

Yes, there is both a .PRO and a VAPI .ATX of the boot disk there that I created myself.

[Shawn Jefferson]

I'm only being partly tounge-in-cheek--I know about this stuff but I don't feel comfortable in divulging the details. If I didn't live in one of the most litigious societies in the world, I could speak more freely about such things.

 

Sorry if that came across as snotty-teenager-nyah-nyah-nyah! That isn't the way it was meant.

 

You're afraid of being sued for cracking 20 year old software?

[Heaven/TQA]

question.... i did my copies with a freezer...booting the stuff until main menu then make the ram snapshot. I am not 100% sure but I have played my copies with such "cracked" versions? or was there a more harder copy protection? btw. I finished AR:dungeon but not sure with the original discs or with my backups.

[Rybags]

I remember trying to crack it.

 

Multi-stage booting with encryption each part. And it didn't allow a RAM-based OS.

 

I think it might have also done checksums of loaded parts so to detect if it was modified.

[Chrodegang]

I think, Homesoft did some decent cracks of both The City and The Dungeon some years ago. But I am not sure if he is still active.

[Shamus]

The City definitely had a layered protection scheme, but once you got past the encrypted checksum routine there was nothing else--at least nothing else that extensive playtesting by my brother could find (I spent all my time making maps while he spent his time levelling up ). It really was quite a challenge to get past all the obstacles that stood in the way.

 

Now when The Dungeon came out, I remember thinking that its protection scheme wasn't nearly as complex as The City's--probably because Mr. Price wasn't involved in it that time around. But yeah, my brother and I (and others) extensively playtested the crack and didn't run into any problems. At least if anyone did, news never reached me. One other thing I did with both of my cracks was to replace the useless sector copier on the B sides of disk 1 with a very useful character ressurrector.

[evilmoo]

Okay, so after slaving for several hours over a hot disassembler, and hammering together some scripts, I have the following to present to you:

 

First, you will need a development environment like mine. I run Linux but I believe any Unix will do. You will also need to have installed PHP (www.php.net), git ( http://git.or.cz/ ), and cc65 (www.cc65.org).

 

Now, with the following commands, you should see some magic happen:

 

git clone git://git.cluephone.com/atari8/ardungeon

cd ardungeon

make

 

With any luck, you will see files being assembled, and the resulting file will be called "ar11.img". This is disk 1 side 1 of Alternate Reality: The Dungeon. It is uncracked, but I believe I have included a crack in the s677.asm file, which will be included if you compile it with "-D CRACKED".

 

I know the Makefile sucks, and that there's no documentation about anything, but this was just a proof of concept. I welcome suggestions, comments and patches. You can either reply to this thread or e-mail me at atari8@cluephone.com.

 

I hope to do the same sort of thing with other programs in the future, but we will see how motivated I am. First I have to beat the other four disks into a similar shape.

[Shawn Jefferson]

I don't have all that stuff to compile this myself, so I'll just ask:

 

Did you just crack this software, or did you unencrypt all the disk sectors AND remove the protection from the software?

[evilmoo]

I don't have all that stuff to compile this myself, so I'll just ask:

 

Did you just crack this software, or did you unencrypt all the disk sectors AND remove the protection from the software?

 

You only really need "git" to download the source.

 

I took what I believe is the crack from the Heist version and integrated into the relevant .asm file. After further study, it looks like I probably have some more bits to integrate into the source I've produced so far. I decrypted all of the portions of the disk that were encrypted, and encrypt them again after the corresponding .asm file is assembled.

 

The main idea here is to take existing programs and disassemble them to the point that they can be rebuilt from the resulting disassembly. The reason I stashed my work so far in git was because it seemed like a good tool to allow multiple people to work on it at the same time, hopefully speeding up the work. I don't know how many other people are interested in this idea but I think it would be neat to take interesting games and programs and "take them apart" so that they can be studied by people wanting to learn about them.

 

I used open source tools because they are freely available and this would let me learn more about them at the same time as learning about the programs I'm taking apart.

 

This is probably a lot more answer than you were expecting but I thought it was important to explain the idea behind this.