Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle

Re:Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle by SV_BubbleTime on Monday February 02, 2026 @11:04AM (#46857545)

SoftICE was such a gift and pain in the ass.

I did a massive crack that involved a program and it’s inf/dll hardware driver package.

Some of the most rewarding work I’ve done and also just so tedious!

Having to stop the OS like that and accidentally getting to the kernel but then not wanting to lose my position so having to hit step over and step out until just the right place… whew.

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Re:Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle by burnte on Monday February 02, 2026 @11:49AM (#46858136)

Yep. I used SoftICE to do a few of these dongle-workarounds. Amazing and terrible software. :D

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Re:Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle by phatskat on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @12:27AM (#46866868)

I honestly can’t recall how I even found SoftICE, but my uncle gave me a floppy with LJPEGViewer and the license was written on the disk. Eventually I lost the original but I’ll be dammed if I’m going to use Paint. I fired up SoftICE, managed to break before the “invalid key” dialog, and just did a cute little “return true” and that was that

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Re:Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle by alias_neo on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @03:01AM (#46867958)

Haha yeah. It was mostly just fun for me as a nerdy child who spent way too much time on Astalavista forum.

Cracking and RE were just gateways into a career in (defensive) security for me.

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