Hey guys, just wanted to give everyone an update since its been a week now.
So I've got some amazing news, and some disappointing news. Since I like to get the bad stuff out of the way first lets start there.
The original deal to obtain the BBCS2 kit fell through. So I will start refunding everyone's money after I finish writing this post. My contact still has another lead for obtaining a legit drive but I dont expect it to cost near as much as buying a NOS kit, so if it works out I should be able to afford it on my own.
Now on for the Amazing news.... 0x11354333!!
Did you get that? Here, let me show you this time.
Now you're probably asking yourself "wtf am I looking at?". This ladies and gentleman, is one of the main reasons we needed to obtain the legit BBCS2 drive and dongle. THAT is the TXCE key, and with these 4 bytes we are now able to play the unmodified and 100% clean dump of the game.
Even after starting this preservation plan, I wanted a "Plan B", no matter how ridiculous it was I wanted to obtain this key. To make a long story short I ended up writing a pretty slow bruteforcer ( ~125 keys per second ), and using multiple PCs to work through different parts of the key space. In a worst case scenario it would have taken a little over a year to cover the whole key space. But After only 4 days of running, I got a hit!
So what happens now?
Since I obtained the key this afternoon I was able to dump the files I needed, and starting with v1.4 of my multi we can now play the unmodified version of this game. My contact is still going to try to obtain a legit drive through other means and if we are successful I will be able to preserve that too. But the most important thing, was the game!
Thanks again to everyone who donated money, and you should have a refund shortly.