UNPROTECTING SHANGHAI Activision says that Shanghai is NOT to be copied at all. Try it and try to run the copied program. You'll get a message about violating the copyright law and your system will be locked up, requiring a cold boot to get it going again. What this means is you've got no backup and no choice but to run your ONE AND ONLY copy whenever you want to play the game. You can't protect it with a write-protect tab unless you want to forget about saving games or score records. Examination of the original disk shows that Activision has included two hidden system files -- IBMBIO.COM and IBMBIO.SYS -- which is to say that the program's distributed on a system disk. However, Activision doesn't bother to TELL you in its documentation that you've got a system disk with part of an operating system on it and that you can transfer your own operating system to it with SYS.COM. Nice people. Some utilities will successfully copy the original disk and some won't. The protection scheme apparently involves a strangely-formatted or written cluster on track 27, side 0. DOS will report it as being a bad cluster but something is nevertheless there which the program had better find on startup, or else. The solution is to change the program files so they won't look for whatever it is they're supposed to look for. Once they're changed, you can copy them to your heart's content, including to your hard drive if you have one and want to run the program from it, and never have to take a chance of ruining the original disk. There are two executable files that need to be changed to unprotect Shanghai -- SHANGPC.EXE and SHANGJR.EXE. You can change both or just the one you need to run Shanghai on your particular system (SHANGPC.EXE for the IBM PC or SHANGJR.EXE for the IBM PCjr and the Tandy 1000). It can be done with a utility such as Norton's that allows you to search for a string of data and change it or it can be done with DEBUG. UNPROTECTING SHANGPC.EXE Copy the files from the Activision disk to a blank disk. (After all, the whole objective of all this is to keep from screwing up the one and only copy, so don't take a chance on screwing it up now.) Using Norton's or a similar utility, search the copy for: CB 1E 55 8B EC 9C It should be found at program location 67B0. Change it to: CB B8 6A DA CB 9C Note that the first and last bytes don't get changed. They're included just to be sure you find the right occurrence of the string that's to be changed because it occurs more than once and this is the only occurrence that you need to worry about. After you've made and saved the changes, try running the program with the changed file and put the original disk away in a safe place. UNPROTECTING SHANGJR.EXE Copy the files from the Activision disk to a blank disk. (After all, the whole objective of all this is to keep from screwing up the one and only copy, so don't take a chance on screwing it up now.) Using Norton's or a similar utility, search the copy for: 13 80 3E 43 3D 00 It should be found at program location 67B8. Change it to: 13 B8 6A DA CB 00 Note that the first and last bytes don't get changed. They're included just to be sure you find the right occurrence of the string that's to be changed because it occurs more than once and this is the only occurrence that you need to worry about. After you've made and saved the changes, try running the program with the changed file and put the original disk away in a safe place.