It's been a while, so I may not be remembering this correctly. What I
do remember was that the copy protection was such that Lotus 123 had to
be installed onto a hard drive. At install time the program would do
some characterization of the hard drive (maybe the computer, too) so
that at run time it could tell if it was running from the hard drive it
was installed on. At install time, if a successful install, it would
decrement a counter on the floppy disk (which itself had some trick
tracks on it). Seems like it gave you two installs, so the counter
started at 2.
Now, to your question...I remember a way to hack the executable files so
that the part of the code that checked to see if it was running from the
hard drive it was installed on was removed. At that point you could
just copy the program as if it were normal, no protection files.
The part I'm not sure about is whether this was version 2 or version 3.
I think I've described version 3.
Hope this helps some.
Gene Ehrich wrote:
> Does anybody know or remember
>
> Are 5-1/4" original diskettes for Lotus 1-2-3 v. 3.1 (DOS) copy protected
> in such a way as to prevent the diskettes from being copied to produce
> usable
> 3.5" diskettes or a CD? I remember that the earliest versions of Lotus
> 1-2-3 required the diskette in the floppy drive as a "key" for the program
> to start-up. I'm not sure what measures were taken for version 3.1.
>
> .
>
--
Dave Mabry dmabry_at_mich.com
Dossin Museum Underwater Research Team
Received on Wed Oct 01 2003 - 13:10:26 BST