When DEMISE 1.01 came out lots of people were upset with the new fancy copy protection. Unfortunately, the protection was 90% of the whole work they did on 1.01. The time spend on ensuring to get a few bucks from long time fans could be much better spent. Some of the discussions about it can be found by searching the Pharaoh forum.

Additionally, the only reason why .NET was/is required for installation of DEMISE 1.01/1.02/1.03 is because they used .NET installer. This was completely unnecessary as there are plenty of free installers which could do the same job and do not require .NET.

Let's see in more detail how the protection works.

1. The installer first asks for the key you get after buying the game.

2. At the end of installation "demisecheck.exe" is run which sends your key and hardware information to Pharaoh which is then validated. If validation fails, you are kicked out of the installation. If it succeeds, the number of installations in Pharaoh database is incremented and hardware info is written to registry. Originally you were only permitted one installation, but it was later changed to allow multiple installations.

3. When you run the game, "DEMISE.EXE" uses the same method as "demisecheck.exe" to get the hardware info and compares it with registry. If there is a match, the game runs, otherwise you get a message that you need to reinstall.


With the long record of screwing over the people it is reasonable to assume the Pharaoh page will eventually disappear and people will be left with a game that doesn't install at all. Also, if you would like to install game 10 times on the same computer when testing (or modding), you just might get your key disabled. So, what can you do?


1. Make your own key:

If key is 012-3456789ABC-DEFG then key is valid if (4 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 10 + 11) % 7 = 0.

What this means is that you just need to add up numbers at positions 4,6,7,8,10,11 and if result is divisible with 7, you got a valid key.

So a valid key as far the installer is concerned might be DTR-0700000000-DOJO.

2. Don't let "demisecheck.exe" to dial home. Either don't give it access if you have a firewall, or just disconnect from the internet. When it fails, kill the installation process or it will delete already installed files. Of course you can also completely remove "demisecheck.exe" from the installer if you know how.

3. To remove the check from "DEMISE.EXE" (1.03) open up your favorite hex editor, go to offset 368B3B and change 85 to 81.