Desperate Plea from a Hired Gun.....

[Hangman]

After 6 years of languishing in my Dad's garage I finally reclaimed my Amiga 1200 and have spent many happy nights playing all those old classics.
However, I have discovered that 3 of my most beloved games are now unplayable as I have mislaid the manual protection. The games (which are all originals) are:
Alien Breed 3D, Populous 2 and (most devastatingly) Hired Guns......
I recall when I went to Uni I didn't have space to take all the boxes so just took the disks in a disk box and the copy protection in a folder......which I put in a 'safe' place. :-?
Anyone who can help me out is welcome to join me and 2 friends in the Luyten system for a killing spree!!
Many thanks.....

[elendil]

Perhaps these games have been released of their commercialness. If so you could probably find working versions of your games at: www.back2roots.org

Sincerely,

-Kenneth Straarup - who never was any good at Hired Guns, though it was an excellent game.

[Mike_Amiga]

Never played Hired Guns myself.
 :-?

[redrumloa]

IIRC Alien Breed 3D is available for legal free download from Aminet. If you have any problem find Aminet or installing it after downloading, just ask. People here are eager to help:-)

[KennyR]

If you own Hired Guns it's technically legal for you to download the cracked ADFs. This goes for the others.

There's also a patch list on Aminet that shows you how to crack the copy protection on some of these games yourself with nothing more than a hex editor like Zap. It's here. Better than hanging around seedy ROMs sites, no? :-)

[SlimJim]

Mike_Amiga wrote:
Never played Hired Guns myself.
 :-?

Brilliant game.  A little unpolished in places, but brilliant. Makes
for excellent cooperation play to control all four characters
simultaneously and independently (you also get some nice
deathmatches).
.
SlimJim

[Varthall]

Quoting the pab3d1_1.readme from Aminet:

(...)
"  * Skips the codebook protection (With FULL PERMISSION from Team17)"
(..)
So at least for ab3d you can legally get rid of the protection.

BTW I've never seen the full version of this game on Aminet. Maybe you were referring to the ab3d2 source, Redrumloa?
Also, as the souce code is available, it means that also the full game has become freeware??

Varthall

[Hangman]

I did have a trawl around to find a Hired Guns crack but I've seen that Scott Johnston claims that he put in extra hidden protection so that after x number of saves it would wipe your saved games...suppose I could give it a try though...

Fantastic game, so atmospheric through a decent stereo..... I had a couple of mates come and stay last week and we played through the first level and were just getting into it again when we had to enter the code....dammit.....gave up and played Worms (The Director's Cut) instead.

Thanks for your advice everyone, I'll have to devote a few hours going through Aminet, Back2Roots and digging out my old Hex editor again.

Cheers