4 ms·

Very true, there are a lot of sites out there back in the day that a lot of oldtimers would remember. My personal favourite was astalavista, named in relation

Very true, there are a lot of sites out there back in the day that a lot of oldtimers would remember. My personal favourite was astalavista, named in relation to the legit search-site altavista I guess. Actually I take that back, my favourite site was +fravia's reverse engineering pages. Mostly because the legitimate crack-sites were safe, but there was always a risk of downloading something with a virus, or a trojan instead. So it was more rewarding to read up on the reversing techniques and do the job myself. Happy days using Numega's soft-ice (kernel mode debugger) to remove the protection it shipped with. When I switched to Linux one of the first "problems" was that there were few commercial binaries which required a license key, so there were fewer reasons to actual get into reverse engineering / decompiling & patching linux binaries.

strictnein 4y ago
Wow astalavista brings back some great memories. Hadn't thought about that site for a long, long time.
girvo 4y ago
> astalavista Phew that takes me back. And it's huge list of cracks and other things is what got me started looking into reverse engineering and security analysis haha
dools 4y ago
> My personal favourite was astalavista, named in relation to the legit search-site altavista I guess. That name contains two very iconic pop culture references from the 90s: altavista and the terminator
- stevekemp 4y ago
  I noticed the terminator connection, but I wasn't too sure of the timescale - which came first. Anyway it's a definitely a nice memory!
selcuka 4y ago
> My personal favourite was astalavista, named in relation to the legit search-site altavista I guess. The domain box.sk [1] hosted other interesting sites as well. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20000229151347/http://www.box.sk/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000229151347/http://www.box.sk...
- jcpham2 4y ago
  Also an astalavista.box.sk user (typo)
qurashee 4y ago
Your post really brought back memories of softice and w32dasm. Incidentally one of the websites from that era (gamecopyworld) is still alive! Mind blown.
- xtracto 4y ago
  Do you remember crackstore? That was my goto place to find software for cracking.
- Borg3 4y ago
  Ahh SoftIce (and later WinIce for Win9x).. Great RING0 debugger.. I used it quite a bit for crack some games myself :) Oh look, it still here on disk: siw405w9x.exe Why I keep it... ;)
egberts1 4y ago
Archive to Fravia’s website Wow. https://www.richardharrison.pro/fravia/ https://www.richardharrison.pro/fravia/

strictnein 4y ago

Wow astalavista brings back some great memories. Hadn't thought about that site for a long, long time.

girvo 4y ago

> astalavista Phew that takes me back. And it's huge list of cracks and other things is what got me started looking into reverse engineering and security analysis haha

dools 4y ago

> My personal favourite was astalavista, named in relation to the legit search-site altavista I guess. That name contains two very iconic pop culture references from the 90s: altavista and the terminator

stevekemp 4y ago
I noticed the terminator connection, but I wasn't too sure of the timescale - which came first. Anyway it's a definitely a nice memory!

selcuka 4y ago

> My personal favourite was astalavista, named in relation to the legit search-site altavista I guess. The domain box.sk [1] hosted other interesting sites as well. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20000229151347/http://www.box.sk/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000229151347/http://www.box.sk...

jcpham2 4y ago
Also an astalavista.box.sk user (typo)

qurashee 4y ago

Your post really brought back memories of softice and w32dasm. Incidentally one of the websites from that era (gamecopyworld) is still alive! Mind blown.

xtracto 4y ago
Do you remember crackstore? That was my goto place to find software for cracking.
Borg3 4y ago
Ahh SoftIce (and later WinIce for Win9x).. Great RING0 debugger.. I used it quite a bit for crack some games myself :) Oh look, it still here on disk: siw405w9x.exe Why I keep it... ;)

egberts1 4y ago

Archive to Fravia’s website Wow. https://www.richardharrison.pro/fravia/ https://www.richardharrison.pro/fravia/