Recently a friend received a hard drive from a client which was out of an In The Groove 3 (ITG3) dance machine. The system had been supplied by Zax Amusements. The reason the customer sent the hard drive in was so that my friend could install an updated video driver to support the Nvidia GT210 because the customer was unable to do so. After a bit of investigation, we discovered the reason the customer was having trouble is because Zax Amusements have protected the system drive using Faronics Deep Freeze. On top of this they have also encrypted the ITG3 partition with True Crypt. While I do understand the protection of the system drive in an Arcade machine that is never turned off properly, I can not comprehend the protection of the ITG3 game, which is Open Source and totally Free and is not their property to protect. Zax Amusements also run couple of custom executables, one of which checks the serial number of the HDD. Then on top of all of this, they have put in some weird key mappings into the registry to render the keyboard useless when your in windows.
My friend contacted Zax asking them for their Deep Freeze password so he could install the drivers and leave the system protected as it was. As we expected, Zax ignored the request, so I proceeded with removing the protection from the hard disk for him. In the end doing this was pointless as we ended up supplying a new version of the ITG3 hdd to the customer along with the usb hub and i-pac for the lights. The new system starts up in a fraction of the time of the Zax version.
I was going to release all of the information on how to do it here, but instead I am just going to recommend that any Australian operators with a ITG3 system who need service, contact Jomac. Jomac will be able to supply you with a version of the ITG3 system which runs a lot faster than the version supplied by Zax, and also allows the use of the USB ports for players to use their own songs on usb.