Acuario has the strangest restriction or protection I have ever found. It is not a copy protection, for it does not prevent copying or distributing it, nor was this the authors intention. You can't call it a shareware restriction either, for the game is freeware, there is not even a way to send the author a donation. But for some reason the anonymous author wanted people to download it again and again, for each time it will run only five times. How does this work, for work it does?
Well, first of all, the downloaded zip file has to be in the directory where Acuario is running. On the first start, the game will write a file called TXWOVLSV.TXE into the root of the C drive. In this file, it stores the number of times the game has run, and the time stamp of the archive. If the game has run five times, and the timestamp of the archive has not changed, the game won't start any more.
So all you really have to do is delete the TXWOVLSV.TXE. Or you could alter the timestamp of the archive by, for example, adding a file to it, the game does not check the size. Amusingly, this strange protection scheme seems to have had some unintended side effects:
Recent versions of Norton AntiVirus (v4.0 and later) incorporate Symantec's advanced Bloodhound technology to detect new and unknown viruses; currently the client detects more than 46,000 known viruses as well as many more unknown viruses via the Bloodhound technology. Bloodhound scrutinizes the overall structure, logic, data, and other attributes of a program and then uses heuristic logic to assess the likelihood of viral infection. This allows NAV to provide some of the best virus protection available, automatically detecting and disinfecting up to 95% of all new and unknown viruses.
THE PROBLEM IS THAT IN MY GAME "ACUARIO" IT MUST BE A STRUCTURE, DATA OR OTHER ATTRIBUTES VERY SIMILAR WHIT A LIKEHOOD OF A VIRAL INFECTION WHICH, OF COURSE, NOT CAUSES ANY DAMAGE IN THE PC. THIS FALSE WARNING ONLY APPEARS WHIT THE NORTON ANTIVIRUS BY ITS NEW BLOODHOUND TECHNOLOGY. MY GAME HAS BEEN ON INTERNER FOR YEARS WHITOUT ANY PROBLEM IN MANY SITES OF FREEWARE AND SHAREWARE GAMES, (www.supershareware.com – www.filetransit.com – download.cnet.com etc, etc…)
Just making an educated guess, I'd say the structure Norton looks for and finds is exactly this strange protection scheme. Writing into the root of the C drive isn't something well-behaved benevolent programs usually do. It is completely harmless in this case, of course, but Norton's suspicion is understandable.
And what about the game itself? The author calls it a classic
and small game of platforms.
You control a jelly fish (medusa)
and have to bump into the oysters from below, so they will open up,
all the time avoiding the black bubbles that follow you. If you take
too long, the oysters will start falling down, adding another hazard.
Some oysters have letters instead of pearls, collecting these in the
right order will gain you a bonus.
The year 1988 was mentioned only on a banner on the (defunct) website for Acuario. The game seems to have been developed or at least recompiled as long as the website was active (2001–2004), making this one of the latest ongoing developments of a CGA game.
