Heya community, Im happy to announce my 1st (real) contribution to assemblergames. I have a HDD image (Power Quest drive image 5.0 format) of the "Beetle Silverball (Pro\Max) v6.0", made by TAB Austria. This device is no longer produced, but TAB Austria is still creating new fun machines. http://www.aus.at/silverba.htm Now, these machines arent super rare, but maybe a bit obscure ? They show up on eBay now and then and depending on the software installed, pend between 150 and 400 $. But if people are interested, Id like to share the HDD image with the community for free. (download link can be found at the end of this post) The mini-games were nicely done for its time and it was great fun on the touchscreen. It also offers Internet, email and Karaoke function. I made this image of the HDD about 13 years ago, somewhere in 2002. Just recently I found the 20GB Seagate HDD in our basement, as we are moving to a new appartment. To my surprise it was still working and I was able to rescue and extract the image. It is 1.6 GB in size. The technical specs of the original machine are as following and it was using Windows 9x. - 433 MHz processor - 128 MB RAM - 10 GB HDD - 800 x 600 pixels - 15 "LCD Display - Motorola 56sm PCI modem - Ergonomic design - Simple Update - Internet - Adjustable screen tilt - All accessible from the front - EURO Ready It used "normal" Mainboards and you could find additional switches "attached to it", to be able to set "freeplay" for example or entering "Service/Test Mode". The following boards have been used in the Silverball (Beetle/Pro): Soyo 5EAS5 Soyo SY-7SBB V1.0 Gigabyte GA-586TX3 Acorp 684XT An opened Beetle. You can see Mainboard, Graphics Card (ATI / Diamond Viper V550 / S3 ?), CPU Socket and Powersupply with an extra circuit board attached to it. These machines needed a dongle to be able to boot. (can also be found on eBay now and then ca. 5-10$) You wil probably need dongle "v6" as its Version 6 of the software. Not 100% sure though. The machine boots into Win9x (Win95 here) and trys to start menu.exe then. Menu.exe and each game.exe require the following dll files (and more) : (can all be found in windows\system) CnData.dll ijl10.dll MailDriver.dll (menu.exe only) Tdgame.dll tdsystem32.dll etc. Just copying all DLLs into the game folder will result into a 0xc0000142 error in Win7, when starting game.exe. Using a Win95 installation and copying the game.exe + all DLL files from Windows\Sytem into one folder, will actually try to start the game but it results into a : A problem has arrived. You can browse and edit all files, so here is some more info I gathered today : The graphic containers : Each game has an extra folder named Confres\General where you can find an ARV file in, which is basically a container, that includes all graphics in BMP format. The sound files : Each game has an extra folder named Confres\General. You can find WAV sound files in there, but also many game.exe files have WAV files within the exe. Some games also have AVI video files in there, that show winnnig, bonus or game over animations. Realplayer 2.0/4.0 is also installed. ^^ You can browse and extract files from the PQI image using the free tool : Norton Ghost Image Browser.exe To actually load it back on a HDD as working Windows9x image, you would either need Norton Ghost or "PowerQuest Drive Image 5.0". (Symantec bought PowerQuest in 2003) Drive Image 5.0 will fail using Win7, just to let you know. The Norton Ghost Image Browser works fine using Win7. So, who heard of the Silverball Beetle before and who might be interested in this, maybe because he just clicked this ? Download link : http://d-h.st/7kOE
The hardlock dongle might be dumpable with some of the stuff found here: http://www.woodmann.com/crackz/Dongles.htm
Still havent found a dongle and hexediting wasnt of any use (yet). Was hoping someone else here is "experimenting" with the image.
Hi, I think that bypassing the hardlock protection should be easy bearing in mind that is a software from Win95 era. Maybe I could help, or at least make a try.
Sorry for the delay. The download link is down so I couldn't download the files. Maybe you could upload the game/program's folder instead of the full disk image.
Hey, the games folder is what makes the "1.6 gigabyte". But I uploaded again, recompressed it. Its 2 files now 1x500mb 1x300mb that will turn into 1 rar archive, with the disk image already unpacked. Part 1 : http://d-h.st/PGAl Part 2 : http://d-h.st/dELw download both files and open cmd typing : copy /b "Unpacked.rar.001" + "Unpacked.rar.002" "Unpacked.rar" p.s. If you know a decent free hoster for big files, feel free to tell me and Ill reupload the original, untouched imagae as well.
The file to crack is tdgame.dll but it seems much more hard than i thought at first Edit: All the exe and dll files are protected by HASP envelope. I think that is impossible, or very hard at least, to crack without having the dongle. With the dongle there's a way to rebuild the files. I thougth that this would be piece a cake, sorry
Hehe no problem, Ill try to get someone else involved into this. If I ever find a dongle for 5 Euro Ill go with the Dongle Emulators for sure. http://www.donglebackup.com/haspsbs.html
