|  Arok Demoscene Party 2010 - Hungary | | Posted by Chronos on 2010-06-28 |
As you probably know, the biggest hungarian 8 bit demoscene meeting is almost here! You can check everything at the party's homepage
Arok Homepage. More important for us, that TLC is going to the party and offers fast,live Commodore Plus4 service, 8501 replaces, and other ways to bring your old commie to life again (Please contact him in the forum before the partydate about details!) You can expect some fresh new Commodore Plus4 releases as it rumoured..
This year there will be a live concert by the SIDRIP ALLIANCE (formed by c64 musicians), and last but not least the organizers offers veeery loud SID music for all your ears... Be there!
Date: 16-18th July, 2010
Place: Gym of Primary School at Ajka-Ajkarendek / Hungary
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| | Adventure Games Continue To Be Unsolved | | Posted by Csabo on 2010-06-27 |
A little while ago last year I mentioned the date June 27 in a news post. Does anyone remember that? No? Even so, I feel compelled to post a little follow up.
Today all adventure games would be solved - if each day just one person added one solution. We did make some progress (most notably almost all Hungarian games are now solved), but there's more to be done. So be sure to contribute - or ask someone if you'd like to but can't or don't know how. And keep solving those adventures! |
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| | AustroSimple | | Posted by Csabo on 2010-06-08 |
Shortly after the news of AustroSpeed being decompiled comes something even more exciting. MikeZ has figured out pretty much all the mysteries of the Austro protection. Intrigued? Read on!
The original Austro had a copy protection "dongle" that plugged into the user port. As soon as the first menu appeared and the user selected drive configurations, Austro did a GOSUB to a dongle reading routine. It PEEKed at FD1X, looking for the bit setting of the dongle. If it was not found, then the first Austro menu repeated forever.
RAVEN created the wedge to insert a JMP $0353 in the Austro run-time interpreter (RTI) in the place where above PEEK is done. This way he could emulate the correct dongle setting and the program would advance to the second menu. This worked, but the approach is flawed. Austro copies its own run-time into whatever C/PRG it compiles. Thus every compiled program carried that JMP $0353 code!
Here's where SVS' wedger comes in. It adds the code to the compiled programs so that when they do jump to $0353, there's valid code there. Until now, it's been said that this wedger is not always necessary, but no one knew why...
The reason that the wedge is only necessary sometimes in a C/PRG is because the said jump is in the PEEK execution. If you
don't use PEEK, then you shouldn't need the wedge! So far no other places have been found, likely this is the only one.
MikeZ continues:
"Now, I was able to see all this because I have my decompiled austroBASIC to look at. RAVEN must have somehow decompiled the dongle GOSUB in order to create the wedge. But I don't think he ever saw what I will now tell. If he did see it, why bother with the wedge?
I studied the dongle GOSUB further and I discovered that the decomp prg I used could not decomp the first byte of the dongle GOSUB. It REM'd it so the decompilation would continue.
The mysterious byte is $3A, which is a legal P-Code that has no BASIC keyword/token equivalent. It has an executable location in the Austro RTI, and its function is basically the same as "NOP" in ML. It came to me to just substitute the P-Code "1D" - RETURN - for the "3A". This immediately bypassed the dongle check!
No need for the crack wedge, no need for the corrupted RTI within every C/PRG produced all these years. I removed the JMP $0353 from the RTI and at Austro P-Code location $4EE0 replaced "3A" with "1D" and we now have a clean and free and compiled AUSTROSIMPLE!"
Well, there you have it. If you're itching to give this a try, just head on to the Austrospeed Compiler page to find the download. Keep in mind that this is in Beta stage. It would be helpful if others could test this as well, so give it a try. Kudos to MikeZ for this amazing discovery! |
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