Ancient? Ughh. I remember using SoftICE to cheat in games back in the 1990’s. Wonderful software, I wish I would’ve been knowledgeable to do something more useful than making myself invincible in Mortal Kombat or giving my characters super powers in UFO: Enemy Unknown (aka: X-Com outside North America).
This was a great learning tool to understand how programs actually allocate and use memory. Long before I had taken an architecture class and understood big endian and little endian, I had learned all about it by searching for values in memory. From there you could basically deconstruct the C structs used to handle the memory and then write a pretty simple TSR to cheat the heck out of DOS games. If I recall correctly, at least some of the time I was even able to use it to cheat at APCIDoom - which was a specialized launcher for Doom that let you play four player deathmatches through your local multi-line BBS.
SoftICE oozed of hax0rz. I did the same thing, training old games like Alley Cat, Digdug, Eagle's Nest, Captain Comic etc. All about getting infinite life, energy, ammo.
Then it was cracking copy protection. A couple of NOP's and a JMP to the correct place (for the easy ones).
#cracking4newbies on EFnet. +ORC (Old Red Cracker), +Fravia and everyone in +HCU (High Cracking University). Wow.. I remember I used to have dreams.
Then win32 came along, and made everything much more complicated.
I really enjoyed Fravia's page back in the day and one of my all time favorite sites by +Malattia (had to search a bit to find it): http://3564020356.org/
Which reminds me...I never figured out that hash-maze but back in the day I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Maybe current-day me will fare better.
I’ve been trying to find this site for years! All of this time, I’ve been convinced it was +mammon I was looking for, but it’s all coming back to me now.
I don’t remember a hash maze, all I remember is that I got stuck for weeks on some puzzle related to wiring schematics, and eventually gave up.
Yup! Discovering SoftICE was a game changer. Various advanced SoftICE diablo 1 and diablo 2 multiplayer “enhancements” circulated back in the day... ones like bypassing the maximum level cap, making your user not render in multiplayer so you couldn’t be clicked on during pvp, among others.
+orc and fravia +hcu stuff ate up loads of my free time in the late 90s and definitely helped later on once I got a formal computer science and engineering degree.
SoftICE and Diablo are the reasons I have a passion for software security and do software development for a living! Ripping Diablo and battle.net to pieces to understand how to make it do what I wanted it to do instead of what Blizzard wanted it to do was how I spent a good chunk of my childhood.
So yes, thank you very much for literally changing my life, SoftICE!
> +orc and fravia +hcu stuff ate up loads of my free time in the late 90s
Ha ha, yeah me too. It was interesting to see how cracking affected software development too. Paintshop Pro 2(?) was the easiest "Hello, world" crack, but the next version was really difficult. I never got to the bottom of it. Their registration verification code seemed to be littered throughout a load of their initialisation functions instead being the simple `if isValid(userCode) unlock()` it once was.
That said, it would no doubt have been easier to reverse engineer if I could have forward engineered at the time... QBasic wasn't really a good gateway to assembler :-D
Yea. I take the ancient part as a personal attack!
I used SoftIce to crack some blowfish licensing scheme of a company that went under.
It was eye opening to be able to pause Windows 95 completely. That sometimes I’d be stepping through code and all of a sudden the code style, memory locations and format all changed because the OS had interrupted and was doing something like painting the mouse.
I really learned to code writing all kinds of hacks for half-life and its numerous mods (mostly counterstrike) and helping teach others to (but not releasing binaries as ruining other peoples' fun wasn't the real goal). I'm grateful for those years and how they formed my views about programming. My neglected personal homepage is still just a little crappy homage to it: http://wrmsr.com/ :)
Used it to hack transparent walls into QW and Quake2 - and it worked online flawlessly. Servers mostly checked for proxies, but not for changed binaries.
> I remember using SoftICE to cheat in games back in the 1990’s.
Pretty much the intro to cracking software and hacking games for 90s kids.
> I wish I would’ve been knowledgeable to do something more useful than making myself invincible in Mortal Kombat or giving my characters super powers in UFO: Enemy Unknown (aka: X-Com outside North America).
Or maybe you were too busy owning noobs to do anything else.
This was a great learning tool to understand how programs actually allocate and use memory. Long before I had taken an architecture class and understood big endian and little endian, I had learned all about it by searching for values in memory. From there you could basically deconstruct the C structs used to handle the memory and then write a pretty simple TSR to cheat the heck out of DOS games. If I recall correctly, at least some of the time I was even able to use it to cheat at APCIDoom - which was a specialized launcher for Doom that let you play four player deathmatches through your local multi-line BBS.