5 ms·

This part of the explanation of what happened to it is extremely unsatisfying: >As of April 3, 2006 the DriverStudio product family has been discontinued becau

by Jerry2 7y ago

This part of the explanation of what happened to it is extremely unsatisfying: >As of April 3, 2006 the DriverStudio product family has been discontinued because of "a variety of technical and business issues as well as general market conditions". Maintenance support was offered until March 31, 2007. From reading about SoftICE, it seems to have been doing what other debuggers could not. So how could they not find enough customers to keep it going? Does anyone know what actually happened?

ashleyn 7y ago
I am willing to guess the general security practices of operating systems improved post-XP, making something like SoftICE prohibitively difficult to develop. There's another word for software that runs undetectable to the OS: rootkit.
eps 7y ago
As amazing as it was, it was a specialist tool that few people needed, with very few of those being able to actually afford it. It was licensed per-machine at a starting cost of $1500.
pjc50 7y ago
It was widely pirated. The same applies to IDA Pro. When a major part of the target market is people trying to remove copy protection, it's very hard to stop them from doing this.
TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
Perhaps it has less of a market when you can affordably run Windows in a VM these days?
shin_lao 7y ago
Former kernel developer here. SoftIce was one of those "magical software" that made things possible. Before, you would need two computers connected via a serial port to do actual kernel debugging. When VMWare arrived, SoftIce was becoming less useful, because a virtual machine offers better isolation and you can quickly revert to a previous state. When doing, for example, file system development, trashing a computer would not be rare. By then, I know my setup was VMWare machines + MSFT WinDbg. Also, I could stop my VM and inspect the VM with a hex editor. Potent combo. In parallel, during that time, I suspect the cost of developing SoftIce exploded: more updates from MSFT, a lot of security features that would prevent SoftIce from working, new features from the CPU like hardware protection of the RAM, etc. Last, the most significant user base of SoftIce was broke hackers who would use it to crack protections. Unsurprisingly, those guys didn't have a license. Awesome product, but makes sense it faded out.

by Jerry2 7y ago

ashleyn 7y ago

I am willing to guess the general security practices of operating systems improved post-XP, making something like SoftICE prohibitively difficult to develop. There's another word for software that runs undetectable to the OS: rootkit.

eps 7y ago

As amazing as it was, it was a specialist tool that few people needed, with very few of those being able to actually afford it. It was licensed per-machine at a starting cost of $1500.

pjc50 7y ago

It was widely pirated. The same applies to IDA Pro. When a major part of the target market is people trying to remove copy protection, it's very hard to stop them from doing this.

TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago

Perhaps it has less of a market when you can affordably run Windows in a VM these days?

shin_lao 7y ago

Former kernel developer here. SoftIce was one of those "magical software" that made things possible. Before, you would need two computers connected via a serial port to do actual kernel debugging. When VMWare arrived, SoftIce was becoming less useful, because a virtual machine offers better isolation and you can quickly revert to a previous state. When doing, for example, file system development, trashing a computer would not be rare. By then, I know my setup was VMWare machines + MSFT WinDbg. Also, I could stop my VM and inspect the VM with a hex editor. Potent combo. In parallel, during that time, I suspect the cost of developing SoftIce exploded: more updates from MSFT, a lot of security features that would prevent SoftIce from working, new features from the CPU like hardware protection of the RAM, etc. Last, the most significant user base of SoftIce was broke hackers who would use it to crack protections. Unsurprisingly, those guys didn't have a license. Awesome product, but makes sense it faded out.