Has the copy protection been removed from these games? I purchased them and am looking forward to playing them again, but I it is a hassle if I have to go back and forth looking up the answers to the copy protection.

As far as EotB is concerned, no. You have to look in the manual for certain pages/lines/words.

Very disappointing as far as I'm concerned. In fact, I may get a refund.

In Pool of Radiance you can get into the game by typing in some nonsense or even nothing and hitting Enter. I do not know, though, if that might trigger some ingame protection like not being able to reach a certain place or superstrong monsters etc.

Yes, there is a "backdoor" to Pool of Radiance (and also to Curse of the Azure Bonds IIRC). You can avoid the copy protection question altogether by adding the word "STING" after the executable in the DosBox conf file.
AFAIK it does not have advers effects.

Copy protection questions should in theory (haven't tried it) also be limited to only once if you use a DOSBox version with Save States function.

Dungeon Hack does the check the first time you go from the first floor to the second in each playthrough.

Interestingly enough, the first letter of the word is already typed for you, making it slightly easier to find the word you need.

I never had any problems with the protection. I didn't try to remove it, I just circumvented it. I changed all of the protection string values to $ (it's towards the bottom of the unpacked EXE. It's packed with EXE-Pack, as I recall).

Nope. There are questions that get asked in random places in CotAB that can't be skipped using the sting flag.

Thankfully there is this: http://www.simeonpilgrim.com/blog/2007/11/01/curse-of-the-azure-bonds-code-wheel-copy-protection/ until CD Projekt get's off their ass and properly supports this or you track down an original box.

Well, there is GOG message on Dungeon Hack's start-up which says that just type anything on password-check. And so far it works.

I have an original Forgotten Realms Archives Collection box. There's a huge book with all the game manuals in it, and a bunch of double-sided code wheels.

I was thinking of buying the GOG version, but sounds like if I rip the discs that came with it it's the same thing except maybe with an updated dosbox. :)

I have the original CotAB around somewhere, too, but that'd be harder to dig up because I'd have to dig through a lot to find the manuals (plus I threw out the original 3.5" disks so only have the manual).

You really can't play a lof of these games without their journals because they'll have maps and other required stuff in them to even plan. Does the GOG version not have the Journal?

I have this collection as well (two copies, actually). I got the GOG version just so I could put my valuable code wheels away. =)

The code wheels (for games that required them), manuals, adventure journals, quick reference cards and the cluebooks (except Dungeon Hack and FRUA which didn't have cluebooks) are included with the games.

BTW the scans for the books were done by a really cool site called the Museum of Computer Adventure Games. The site has a wealth of digital exhibits on a large number of games - many with scans of manuals and other documentation that came with various games. Great site to get lost in for a few hours. =)

Flynn

Edit -- Whoops, I realized not all of the scans are from MoCAG. Some are from ReplacementDocs.com and may not be as nice as the MoCAG scans. Treasures of the Savage Frontier's Adventure Journal for example has some blurred sections that are difficult to read and is identical to the file I'd downloaded from ReplacementDocs. The scan on MoCAG is much better quality and hopefully GOG can include their scans in future releases. =)

An item of note here, when Interplay released "The Forgotten Realms Archive" (which contained everything in these three collections except FRUA) they included the password protection answers for all but PoR and CotAB. The code wheels, ya know. From experience PoR has only thirteen questions, which I made and keep a list of. CotAB is much more complicated and I've not been able to figure that one out. Luckily, if you need them, GOG provides a PDF of the code wheels, one page for each of the 36 wheel settings, where you can look up the answers if you need to.

I own all the Gold Box games in the original Gold Box versions, I also have the original Forgotten Realms Archives CD and the Wizardworks 9-game CD.

When I played the games however (several times over the years), I used cracked versions because I could not be bothered with the code-wheels / Journal lookups.

I never had any problems whatsoever and managed to complete all the games.

The only problem I ever had with cracked versions was with the first Buck Rogers.
The crack had the side effect of causing all monsters to "commit suicide" at the beginning of each combat!
It did make the game a lot easier but somewhat pointless :D

With regards to the Journals, for those games that were released on the C64 too (all of them except POD, DQK and TotSF), there are text-only versions available online from various sources related to the C64.

Before you start a game you can check on the cluebook which entries are "real" and create a document by copying and pasting the text with the required paragraphs in the correct order & print it out or create an ad-hoc PDF.
As for the maps, the cluebooks will tell you which are needed and which are fakes so you can print selectively to paper or PDF :)

Over the years I have been collecting everything I could find online about these games...

CLUEBOOKS: there were two versions of the cluebooks (I own all of them in both versions).
The originals had the cover and some of the text in one colour (green, brown, dark red, etc depending on the games)
The Wizardworks collection included all the printed manuals but had a card that you could sent off to order the cluebooks very cheaply. I ordered the whole set of nine (although I already had all the originals!).
The Wizardworks cluebooks were identical to the originals except that they were all in Black and White and the print quality was not very good.

Perhaps some of the poorer quality scans come from those :)

This was the same for the Wizardworks Eye of the Beholder CD collection (which I also have).

Hope this helps :)

PS.: Not sure if anyone mentioned this already but after you install the GOG versions of Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds and Hillsfar there is a file in each of their folders called codewheel.exe.
These are the electronic versions of the codewheels for each game :)