I did reverse engineering as a hobby in my teens. The method for 90% of cracks back in the day boiled down to:

1. Launch the app.

2. Trigger the "not registered" screen.

3. Search for the string in the binary.

4. Search for code that references the location of the string and squint hard until you spot the "check if CD-key is valid" section.

5. Patch the final opcode from "jnz" to "jz". If you felt fancy, reverse engineer the checking algorithm to create a keygen instead of a patch.

Anticracking methods became mainstream in the late 90s, but they weren't very sophisticated and most amounted to obfuscation.

Long live +ORC, +Fravia and CracksLatinos.

This was me as well. +HCU and searchlores.org were so much fun. The coolest thing I remember was the hash-maze but I couldn't find it again. I saw Fravia live in 1999 :D

Switching 0x74 to 0x75 and vise versa lead to me ordering the free Intel books and diving into assembly and osdev for a while. There was something zen-like wading through disassembled code with a complete beginner mind and looking for patterns. This and reading Phrack around the "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit" times are probably my favorite memories related to computing because I only had a very vague understanding of what was going on mixed with a sense of "wait you can do this" and a lack of readily available information.

I did this to an industrial piece of software that required a hardware dongle to function, that my father and his colleagues were using.

For a few hours, I was a teenage god among men.

That hits the feels. Sometimes I miss late night sessions on SoftICE hah

Efnet user spotted :)

And when the crack came out on the same day as the CD release it was called a zero-day. A term that has long since lost ita original meaning, in fact it has been inverted.

I remember old games shipping with huge lists of codes on paper. Paper made, on purpose, too big for an US legal/A4 photocopier. And moreover the codes would be using "light blue characters on slightly less light blue paper". Very annoying for casual piracy (as in: copying your neighbor's version of the game).

> Later, the apps that would clone a USB dongle came along, and one software company that used USB dongles actually advised using this tool when we started running their software on Blade servers that did not support adding 24 USB devices.

That's a good one!

I have a whole collection of boxes featuring anti-piracy stuff: https://fabiensanglard.net/happy/index.html

The sentence "This created an only-too-familiar situation where illegitimate users enjoyed a better experience than paying customers." is a direct reference to these system which annoyed people who actually paid for their game!

Only to be repeated with the experience of streaming vs torrents

Siemens for some software uses a license system that uses "secret" files stored on "dongle" that is just USB stick, and software that manages copying to hard drive etc.

I have heard of several cases where Siemens technicians and support staff would use a well-known "crack" (actually more of a keygen combined with license file manager) or guide customers how to obtain and use it...

Remember, legally (usually), the really important part is the proof of contract and payment, not exact way the software was activated

Wasnt Monkey Island II delivered with this color-code-wheel?