Some time ago Microsoft released a "Plus!" Windows XP edition with additional games, themes and other stuff.
Since it was necessary to allow the Plus execution only to legitimate owners, MS added some licensing checks that are no longer supported on more recent Windows editions.
Though these games were not particularly interesting and I believe they were cracked somehow and available somewhere, it was interesting to analyze their behavior and try to fix the native versions.
The first experiment was with "The Labyrinth Plus! Edition". This game requires a few registry entries that can be easily emulated by DxWnd virtual registry, but also needs a confirmation from eulachk.dll, a system dll that is no longer installed and in any case couldn't work.The call name can be found in the Dxwnd logs, and guessing the interface was a lucky shot but not too difficult, so I built a fake eulachk.dll with this source code:
As you can see, nothing too complicated. Dropping the dll in the game folder allowed it to run.
In attach the fake dll and the export file, just in case ...
There are other games too, but "3D Space Cadet Pinball" runs with no need of additional tricks, and "Russian Square" behaves curiously and I can't make it run (yet!)
I tried Russian Square and the game works fine here in Win7 with the eulachk.dll library.
But I tried it from the "Plus For Windows Xp" package from the web archive, I don't know if it's the same.
I tried first with a patched release from Lucas C here: https://lucasc.me/post/microsoft-plus-patched-installers so I feared it was a bad patch, but then I tried again with the files from one of the many Internet Archive sources and nothing changed.
Could you PM me the link that you used? Maybe also your DxWnd profile. But the culprit could be not the files but the Win11 environment. The log tells weird things, I don't understand ....
In any case, at least the trick applied to "Hyperbowl" works too.
Ah! I got something!! "Russian Square" works perfectly without DxWnd by just adding the eulachk.dll library. There must be something wrong in the LoadLibraryExW wrapper.
update: the problem is fixed by avoiding the use of the virtual registry. Enabling it clears somehow the eulachk.dll pathname. I will have to check for possible memory corruptions!
Last edit: gho 2025-09-02
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Some time ago Microsoft released a "Plus!" Windows XP edition with additional games, themes and other stuff.
Since it was necessary to allow the Plus execution only to legitimate owners, MS added some licensing checks that are no longer supported on more recent Windows editions.
Though these games were not particularly interesting and I believe they were cracked somehow and available somewhere, it was interesting to analyze their behavior and try to fix the native versions.
The first experiment was with "The Labyrinth Plus! Edition". This game requires a few registry entries that can be easily emulated by DxWnd virtual registry, but also needs a confirmation from eulachk.dll, a system dll that is no longer installed and in any case couldn't work.The call name can be found in the Dxwnd logs, and guessing the interface was a lucky shot but not too difficult, so I built a fake eulachk.dll with this source code:
As you can see, nothing too complicated. Dropping the dll in the game folder allowed it to run.
In attach the fake dll and the export file, just in case ...
There are other games too, but "3D Space Cadet Pinball" runs with no need of additional tricks, and "Russian Square" behaves curiously and I can't make it run (yet!)
Last edit: gho 2025-09-02
I tried Russian Square and the game works fine here in Win7 with the eulachk.dll library.
But I tried it from the "Plus For Windows Xp" package from the web archive, I don't know if it's the same.
Last edit: huh 2025-09-02
I tried first with a patched release from Lucas C here: https://lucasc.me/post/microsoft-plus-patched-installers so I feared it was a bad patch, but then I tried again with the files from one of the many Internet Archive sources and nothing changed.
Could you PM me the link that you used? Maybe also your DxWnd profile. But the culprit could be not the files but the Win11 environment. The log tells weird things, I don't understand ....
In any case, at least the trick applied to "Hyperbowl" works too.
Ah! I got something!! "Russian Square" works perfectly without DxWnd by just adding the eulachk.dll library. There must be something wrong in the LoadLibraryExW wrapper.
update: the problem is fixed by avoiding the use of the virtual registry. Enabling it clears somehow the eulachk.dll pathname. I will have to check for possible memory corruptions!
Last edit: gho 2025-09-02
Yes, I tried it without DxWnd, maybe I should have mentioned that.