http://www.hirameki-int.com/appc/products/piece/index.html
It’s $24.99. You get to play for 45 minutes before you’re required to purchase to continue to play.
The CD-ROM version is still scheduled to be released on the 28th of February for $29.99.
[ 01-22-2007, 05:46 AM: Message edited by: Mockingbird ]
Neat. Too bad it’s not hooked with affiliate systems to allow me to push it to my customers… 
Why the fuck did they have to put DRM into the trial? Couldn’t they make a stripped-down version?
It uses DRM made by Protexis, which requires IE components. One of those components may even by an M$ Access component, ODBC32.DLL.
On a side note, I’m still wondering why Hirameki’s games require 800 Mhz to run when they’re just visual novels. Sounds like lazy programming to me.
Saving money, probably.
Putting a wrapper around a single exe is a lot faster and easier than coding a separate demo. Also, by releasing a keycoded full version, they can host the entire thing on download.com’s servers and not have to pay any bandwidth bills for the purchases!
(I’m not that fond of wrappers, but I have to use them with some of the portals I sell through.)
I’ve played it on my WinXP laptop until my license expired. It turned out that the XML error I kept getting when trying to apply for my license was because of the hat on the i in my name! I hope I can still get another license to continue testing on my Win95. The game runs in 640x480 (Ever17 was 800x600), and doesn’t seem to use that many effects, so perhaps the 800 Mhz claim was exaggarated.
I liked what I played. I got to the second morning. I didn’t get to any gameplay yet, though. Since I’m so anal about grammar and spelling, I paid attention to it, and I’m happy to report that the game is error-free so far. 
I got as far as the first battle sequence to prove that there ARE battle sequences before running out of time before being able to land an attack.
The only error that jumped at me was a hoard/horde mistake, but alas, plenty of native English speakers get that one wrong…
It won’t start on Windows 95, presumably because of missing cryptography providers. Just great. One of the purposes of a demo version is to be able to test if the game would run on your PC.
Granted, a wrapper could be easier than making a demo version (though I personally doubt that), but download more than 400 MB for a trial version is overkill. Especially here, where I have a bandwidth limit of 10 GB.
(though I personally doubt that)
… Why do you personally doubt that? You have your completed project. You pay for a wrapper program. You apply the wrapper to it. Most of the time, you’re now DONE. (Unless, of course, your game and the wrapper program turn out to be incompatible and you have to do some tweaking.)
To make a separate demo, you have to get the programmers involved in making a whole new build and stripping content out of it. If you’ve got the original programming team on board, this isn’t THAT hard, especially if they were planning to do it from the beginning and have a good idea of what things need to be removed. However in most of these translation cases, they’ve probably been a lot less involved with the inner workings and more with just replacing the text (I don’t know for certain, I’ve never worked for any of these companies.) You can’t just delete a pile of image files and say that it’s done. You’ll have to be sure that the player will never accidentally encounter any missing content. You’ll have to change the dialog tree to cut everything off at the end point and loop back to the menu - possibly add new lines for ‘Buy the game please!’ You’ll have to add extra testing time to play through this new chopped version as well as testing the full version.
And annoyingly, if you then discover something that needs fixing in the full version, you may have to update both the full version and the demo version. You’ve got two builds to maintain.
This is one reason that a lot of downloadable game distributors don’t deal with separate demos, it’s a lot of extra hassle. (The other reason is that a lot of CUSTOMERS don’t want to have to download the full version separately when they pay for it.)
I agree that I think it’s annoying to download more than 100MB for a limited trial, but plenty of people do it. I’ve seen 1GB downloads. Usually in cases where the game has been on sale in CD form for a while, and then the publisher decides to try and get some extra sales by putting the game up for download, but WITHOUT having to pay the salary of all the programmers at the development house to make a new demo.
http://www.download.com/Space-Rangers-2-Rise-of-the-Dominators/3000-7539_4-10535428.html?tag=lst-0-1
appears to make you download over a gig for a mere THIRTY MINUTE demo! Sheesh!
Right, I forgot that this Hirameki, like Peach Princess, translates the game, and most of the time doesn’t see much code.
Still, they managed to get demos out for Ai Yori Aoshi and Ever17, so I’m disappointed. 
From the game’s page, these are the REAL system requirements:
OS: Windows98/Me/2000/XP
‚b‚o‚t: PentiumII 350 MHz / Celeron 466MHz
MEMORY: 128MB
‚g‚c‚c: 800MB
‚c‚h‚r‚o‚k‚`‚x: 640~480
‚u‚h‚c‚d‚n: DirectX8, Direct3D(8MB)
So, it requires a 3D card too? No problem, I’ve got a Voodoo card.