Inferno patch
-------------

By Martin Bazley, Sunday 17th March 2013

This is a small, stand-alone utility which spun out of my ongoing work on a new and exceedingly snazzy re-release of the Music Ripper's Toolkit.  (Indeed, some of the code in here was lifted straight from there, making this its first public outing, but it's all been tweaked and optimised for this specific purpose.)

It will (or should) remove the copy protection from the game Inferno, enabling you to enjoy the game without having to keep a fifteen-year-old floppy disc on standby at all times.

Note that it will *not* upgrade the game to be 32-bit compatible, or RISC OS 6 compatible, or any of the other doubtless very useful things it could be.  The hardware you can run it on remains as restricted as ever.

Chances are you, like me, are increasingly worried that one day the last remaining Inferno floppy will simply stop working; indeed, maybe yours already has.  This application is an honest attempt at preservation.  It contains no actual code or data from the game (apart from a replacement !Run file), and requires a full copy of the !Inferno application to run.  It does not, however, require an original Inferno floppy disc.

When you run !InfPatch, a window will open in the centre of the screen.  Drag the !Inferno application on your hard disc (DO NOT ATTEMPT TO PATCH YOUR ORIGINAL INFERNO FLOPPY DISC) to this window.  A few seconds later, an error box should open giving the non-error message that the patch was successful.

These are the operations that the patch performs:

 * It renames the original !Inferno.!Run file to !Inferno.OldRun.
 * It loads and decompresses the chunk named 'Go' from within the MenuData file,
   changes a few carefully selected words, and saves this as an executable file
   named !Inferno.Go.
 * It copies the file !InfPatch.NewRun from inside itself to !Inferno.!Run.
   This prevents the file !Inferno.!Intro (which generates a warning if the
   Inferno disc is not present) from being run, and it replaces the main game
   startup command with an instruction to run !Inferno.Go.

The original, copy-protected executable is therefore still present, and no data is destroyed.

To revert the patch, delete the !Run file, and rename OldRun back to !Run.  You may then delete the Go file, and the application will be back to exactly how it was before.

Contact the author thusly: mailto:martin@bazleyfamily.co.uk

And here's a website full of stuff you might want: http://kingfishercorner.eu/

And here's some stuff you probably don't want: http://twitter.com/swirlythingy