Hi,

this is "The Mars Saga" by Westwood Associates / Electronic Arts. There were
too many requests for this title, and even more defective versions floating
around, so I decided to crack and upload it.

Many thanks to Paul David D. (the guy who also runs the PreCAP archive), who
was kind enough to provide me with a clean, virgin original. There was some
kind of trap in the actual loader, and another one (the usual codeword
request) in the game itself: Everytime you enter a city, the game normally
requests some codes from the manuals or whatever has accompanied the original
disks. Both things should be fixed now.

But: Since I didn't play this game for too long, I cannot really say if I was
able to remove virtually ALL copy-protection requests. I only checked if
everything was "okay", i.e.: if the "Player Disk" was copyable, if the
graphics in the game (as far as I played, i.e.: in the first city and a part
of the outer Martian world) and during the initial demo were correct, and if
the aforementioned code requests were disabled. So, PLEASE, if anybody should
encounter another "pirate trap", please try to get into touch with me (possib-
ly with sending me a "Player Disk" with the appropriate saved games?).
I can be contacted by posting to comp.emulators.cbm, or by fetching my e-mail
address from there - if you're really serious with bothering me ;-) ...

Now I can only wish that Arnold's sysops will move this game to their public
filebase soon. Enjoy!

Chris L.



P.S.: For anybody who wants to patch his own original "The Mars Saga" disks,
these are the strings you have to search for:

Disk #1, Offset $1513B ($20 $58 $88) => ($4C $00 $13)
   "        "   $17EB7 ($D9 $68 $87) => ($A9 $00 $EA)
Disk #2,    "   $20CB7 ($D9 $68 $87) => ($A9 $00 $EA)

...Yes, the byte sequence to be modified on disk #2 is equal to the one on the
first disk...!
