[Pannoniae]

>When you want to cast a spell you have to enter the number of the spell from the manual, maybe because there was not enough memory to fit the names of the 94 spells into RAM

Probably not ;) "Enter things from a manual" was a tried old copy protection technique. If you used the warez version you presumably did not have a manual so you got stuck. This didn't run on the 8008 or whatever, I'm sure the game could have known the names of spells fairly easily.

[tralarpa]

Ah, that makes more sense than my theory. It's a weak copy protection method, though, as you can just try and see what happens, and I think they dropped it in M&M3.

[Anamon]

Yes, and it was pretty easily photo-copied since it had to be printed all in one place anyway. That's probably why even print-based protections tried to get cleverer. Like the code wheels, although I remember those didn't take that much more effort. Disassemble the original, copy all layers, cut out the right holes, put back on a spindle.

I remember one game I had that tried to protect against it by having a manual of about 100 pages, with the passcodes being spread across all of them. I believe it was Gunship 2000.