Ultima IV: When/where does the protection get checked?

[BarryB]

Have a copy of Ultima IV that seems to have a 'broken' protection track accordig to Denis (CT RAW in The Zone) but seems to let you start the game, make a Play Disk and save/load your game!

The official IPF (US Relase) uses Xelok protection that Abaddon has supported in Disk-Utilities but my dump is not identified as Xelok and Abaddon has been looking through the code but hasn't yet found where/if the protection gets checked!

Psygore did the WHDLoad but there is no mention of protection being removed!

So does anyone know when/where the protection kicks in and/or what it affects?

[kremiso]

maybe just raising the battles difficulty, as described here?

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.p...innable/Ultima

'...Ultima IV has copyright protection that ramps up the difficulty of the game's combat to impossible levels...'

dunno

[BarryB]

Does that mean I have to play it now to find out

[Supamax]

Originally Posted by BarryB

Does that mean I have to play it now to find out

Let us know

Originally Posted by BarryB

CT RAW in The Zone

Just out of curiosity: how do you generate CT RAW files? With a KryoFlux?
Or maybe with the SPS utility (not distributed)?
Are .CT files the same as .RAW files found in Turran FTP?

[BarryB]

As long as you have the stream files from a Kryoflux dump you can create a CT RAW file using the latest v3.00 Kryoflux software that you can download from kryoflux.com, creates CT RAW files that are usually less than 3mb in size!

dtc -m1 -f<folder>\<streamfilename> -i0 -f<file.ct> -i2 -i5 -l8

Not sure if the .raw on the ftp are the same, not checked! .raw files can be generated with HxC by dragging at least one stream file onto HxC then exporting it as KF Stream file which adds the .raw extension to the stream name!

[Supamax]

Originally Posted by BarryB

As long as you have the stream files from a Kryoflux dump you can create a CT RAW file using the latest v3.00 Kryoflux software that you can download from kryoflux.com, creates CT RAW files that are usually less than 3mb in size!

dtc -m1 -f<folder>\<streamfilename> -i0 -f<file.ct> -i2 -i5 -l8

Thanks .
I suppose that the main (the only one, maybe?) reason for converting KF RAW files to a CT RAW file is the filesize savings... right?
(and the fact that WinUAE can directly accept CT RAW files but not KF RAW ones)

Not sure if the .raw on the ftp are the same, not checked! .raw files can be generated with HxC by dragging at least one stream file onto HxC then exporting it as KF Stream file which adds the .raw extension to the stream name!

Thanks!

[BarryB]

Yes, CT RAW files are a 'compressed' form of all the stream files into a single file, that's the only 'raw' file type I think WinUAE accepts!

[slaapliedje]

Originally Posted by kremiso

maybe just raising the battles difficulty, as described here?

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.p...innable/Ultima

'...Ultima IV has copyright protection that ramps up the difficulty of the game's combat to impossible levels...'

dunno

I can't speak for the Amiga version, but the Atari 8bit version had a few things;
1) the combat was impossible. You could sit there and attack a child in the city of Britain for an hour, and it would only ever say 'The child is lightly wounded'.

2) There were two sectors that weren't copied correctly (or the one we copied off was corrupted) so they were all zeroes. This was around the castle, Empath Abby, and one was where the Skull of Mondain is found.

Funny enough we randomly figured out somehow to take a bad disk (we had to sacrifice one to Lord British) and to copy a track off of it using a Happy 1050 drive over the track that was empty on the Ultima IV Britannia disk. (this was blind luck that they did it for the whole track, as the Happy drive software could only do such a thing one track at a time (18 sectors if I recall correctly, this was like 25-30? years ago...). Once the bad data was on that track, issue number 1 was fixed. For issue number two, I pulled out Disk Wizard and some hex paper and recreated the two zeroed out sectors by discovering that 00 was deep water, 01 was shallow water, 02 was grass, etc. Much trial and error later, I learned how I could essentially redraw Britannia.

Wonder how much of that information pertains to the Amiga. :P

[BarryB]

It's files on the Amiga so not sure if the Atari 8bit version loaded data as sectors or files?

Haven't played this much as it's some time to get familiar again with it and I've been doing other things