In wizardy 6 you can type anything when asked for a spell code at the beginning of each game.

For nostalgic reasons I still look the code up, and it's in DOS Boxs (I'm using Win7 Pro 64bit) and changing to Acrobat doesn't impede playing in any way.

Agreed on point 1 fully.

For point 2, there appears to be no available crack for the Ishar series for PC. So, sadly, there's nothing for the GOG team to apply to remedy the situation and I doubt their staff has the expertise to step through the program in a debugger, find the subroutine location that goes to the copy protection scheme, and replace the JMP instruction location with the location a successful code entered goes to.

[url=http://www.csn.ul.ie/~darkstar/assembler/tut3.html]http://www.csn.ul.ie/~darkstar/assembler/tut3.html[/url]

I could probably do it if I had the spare time. I wrote a crack for The Summoning a long time ago. But I'm way too busy these days.

Nah, that's just not how it works. People step through the code in something like good ol' Debug.com in DOS or Watcom's Debugger and find where the copy protection scheme kicks in and typically apply a JMP patch as I mention above. This is a very standard thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_debuggers

Silmarils games, Ishar included, are interpreted, with the executable basically being a virtual machine implementation and not much else. Protection (as well as pretty much everything else) is also done in the interpreted bytecode so cracking it is a bit more difficult and time consuming than simply finding the right assembly instruction in the code and applying a JMP patch. You have to find the bytecode implementation of the protection scheme (i.e. figure out which file contains the protection routine and find the exact location of the routine in the file), learn how it works by learning what each interpreted command does and figure out a way to patch it by using interpreter's commands available to the game. After that you can either write a loader to do the patching in memory or patch the file directly (in this case you'll have to unpack it first since it's packed with a custom packer). I'm speaking from experience here as someone who cracked the game.

Oh jesus... Programmers really went all-out back then. It's still possible to crack that (or anything) but that makes it a giant PITA. I recall attempting to hexedit my Ultima Underworld saves and realizing they had used an XOR encryption scheme to protect data writes to it. Following through 255 XOR's is ridiculous. The only way to combat something like that is to write a program to do it, unless you don't care about your sanity.

People talk about the copy protection here :

http://eab.abime.net/project-whdload/68339-ishar-aga-protection-fails.html

I guess I'll just share my crack/loader I've made for the first game in the series (Legend of the Fortress). The loader removes the protection (just hit enter when the game asks you to enter a word) as well as the stupid requirement to pay gold to save.

Here's the link.

No installation of any kind is required. Just copy ishar1.com to the game's folder and edit dosboxishar1.conf (replace the line 'start.exe' in the autoexec section of the file with 'ishar1.com').

I've also included the source code, to compile it you'll need MASM or JWASM.

Link is dead, can you please reupload? No pay for save sounds like miracle to be true :)

Sure.

Thanks a lot! I go into fantasy world without save fee :)

Hey Winterfury are you still looking at this forum ? How can I contact you ?