I have been trying to get Little Big Adventure 2 running on my emulator handheld, and uh. Does it count that I can get it to display the "please insert the CD" screen?
What I've learned so far:
- There's DRM in the original release, that checks for the disk label+contents.
- The widely available no-CD cracks only seem to patch the Windows executable, not the Linux one.
- The current 'original' version on GOG is not, in fact, the original version; it is a patched executable that only works on Windows.
- The *previous* release on GOG (no longer available for purchase) *does* use the DOS version; I was able to grab it from a torrent.
- Against my expectations, the old GOG release *doesn't* patch out the CD check - I'm currently trying to figure out how this ever worked, given that I see no evidence of a disk image getting mounted in the GOG release, and it *must* have worked at some point if they were able to sell it.
- All of this while I *do*, in fact, have a legitimate disk of the original release, but... good luck inserting a CD-ROM into a modern handheld, and I don't particularly feel like fucking around with mount scripts either...
Err, "not the Linux one" should be "not the DOS one", of course. Whoops.
- LBA2 *will not* run if it's launched from "C:\", so you need to make sure that it's within a subfolder from the perspective of DOSBox. In EmulationStation, that means running something that is one folder up from the game (it doesn't have to run *successfully*) and then navigating to the correct executable from the menu, or presumably you can also use a .bat file to do this.
@joepie91 Did you bindiff the Windows executable before and after patching to see if you can find matching bytes in the Linux one?
One step further would be to compare the disassemblies and see if you can replicate with information from that.
@gamambel I did not - that's quite a bit outside of my usual comfort zone, and so I ran out of spoons to dive that deeply (at least for now).
In case I can nerdsnipe you (or someone else) into trying this out: I've tried with both https://archive.org/details/little-big-adventure-2 (run SETUP first or it won't work under DOS) and the 11-year old GOG torrent, and I've tried both of the cracks on GameCopyWorld. Cracks found elsewhere seemed to be identical to the ones on GCW.
So if anyone has a preconfigured DOSBox setup handy that LBA2 works under, *without* needing to manually mount a disc, I'm all ears :)