Ah, I remember now. I did not use the crack - it didn't work for me, nor does it now, neither in the 1.001 version on that pirated cd, nor in the 1.004 version now available online. I found where passwords are stored for verification and edited them out.
The file in question is Steel4.mk1 in steeldat folder. It starts with "108" (total number of passwords), then followed by passwords each taking 4 lines - password itself and 3 numbers for page, line, word, all encoded. What you do is change "108" to "1", delete all lines after the 5th (so only one password and its 3 numbers remain), and delete all bytes in line 2 (password itself) except one, leaving it a single-letter word. Now, when the game asks you for password (always the same now) and offers first letter, you just hit enter and it lets you in. You don't even need a hex editor for that, plain notepad will work.
My Steel4.mk1 looks like that:
1
‘
‘
‘
‘
(in hex, 31 0d0a 91 0d0a 91 0d0a 91 0d0a 91 0d0a, 0d0a being carriage return). The game asks for the word number 0 on line 0 of page 0, starting appropriately with 0 which is its single letter
Curiously, my 1.001 versions runs straight from XP with mouse support AND sound (imagine that!), whereas the downloaded 1.004 has neither, although configurations are the same.