Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Sun Jul 01, 2007 3:03 am

I get an error when starting up - "Your trial period has expired. Click the Buy button to purchase this software, or click the Enter Key button to enter your purchased license key." This would be all well and good if I hadn't kept a valid license of CMUD on my computer since October of last year or so. Clicking "ok" on this dialogue causes CMUD to wait a good long while and then eventually boot up properly. My name is in the left hand part of the session select popup just like it should be. My next port of call is going to be unlicensing and relicensing CMUD, but for some reason I'm not allowed to request a new key despite never requesting one before (I'm submitting a ticket for that one).

I post this because it's a pretty damning bug and was curious if anyone else had experienced it.

Magician Joined: 25 Oct 2000 Posts: 461 Location: USA

Odd... not anything that I've seen, and I've had no problems with requesting a new key either (reinstalled XP). Using Vista by any chance?

Apprentice Joined: 12 Jul 2004 Posts: 190 Location: Canada

I haven't unlicensed or anything since my initial installation of CMud on this computer (which I think was somewhere around 1.13 or so). Haven't had any issue with that on my end... and I've gone through several upgrades and full reinstallations.

Posted: Sun Jul 01, 2007 5:51 am

Are you sure the message is coming from CMUD and not from zMapper (it should say in the caption of the window)? CMUD tries to install the zMapper plugin when you run it, and if zMapper is installed, but has expired, then you can get that message. So double-check that...I get emails about it every week or so.

Posted: Sun Jul 01, 2007 10:30 am

Ah, that'll be the problem, I did install zMapper a few weeks ago to give it a try. It'd be nice if it'd either fail in the background since I'm running CMUD and not zMapper or if it were more obvious that it's zMapper failing and not CMUD. But I'm just happy that something isn't wrong with my installation :)

Posted: Sun Jul 01, 2007 5:23 pm

Unfortunately, it's a limit in the copy protection system. Remember that the copy protection is essentially a "wrapper" around the application. When the trial expires, the wrapper prevents the application from being loaded by Windows (the application is encrypted on disk, so Windows can't load it normally).

With eLicense, there was no way to query a license. So the only way to tell if zMapper was licensed was to try and call one of it's COM routines. Windows then tries to load the EXE, which then triggers the trial expiration window.

With the newer Armadillo stuff, it might be possible for me to query the license status without trying to run zMapper. But this needs to wait until the mapper rewrite when I recompile zMapper in Delphi 7 and use the Armadillo API in it. So, it's something on my to-do list, but that's why it works the way it does right now.

The window caption *should* tell you which program is telling you about the trial being expired. If it doesn't have zMapper in the window caption, let me know. The trial expiration message itself is set within Armadillo and can't be easily changed (at least not that I'm aware of).