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Re:Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle by Aaargh20318 on Sunday February 01, 2026 @07:42PM (#46851022)
I remember doing something similar with Lemmings 3D. You could simply NOP over the JMP into the copy-protection subroutine. It was surprisingly easy.

Made me feel like such a badass hacker at 15 years old.

Re:Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle by p1mrx on Monday February 02, 2026 @12:04AM (#46852618)
When I was 10 or so, I "cracked" Slam! Air Hockey for Windows 3.1 by opening the exe in EDIT.COM and replacing some random binary garbage with spaces. After a few attempts, I managed to bypass the shareware dialog but also introduced some weird bugs that I don't recall the details of.
Re:Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle by 2Gkashmiri on Monday February 02, 2026 @02:04AM (#46853254)
"Cheat enginge"

This was one of those things you really really wanted but once you toyed with it, it sucked the fun out of games and they felt pointless.