4 ms·

It’s a great way to learn - so challenge. There’s neither fame nor money here I think. At least in the 90s there were lots of tutorials to learn how to crack/r

It’s a great way to learn - so challenge. There’s neither fame nor money here I think. At least in the 90s there were lots of tutorials to learn how to crack/reverse engineer, from +orc’s documentation to fravia ´s fortress of reverse engineering - I’d expect similar tutorials to still be around. Reverse engineering also happens to be a very useful skill as a regular software engineer ( debugging compiler bugs, figuring out why software X is behaving strangely and what it is doing etc ).

rmilk 3y ago
Exactly true. Was a teenage software hacker, reverse engineered many games mostly because I was a bored teenager with free time and many games I legitimately bought. Mostly it was to cheat a little, like tweaking player stats or number of lives in a save file. All that reverse engineering experience gave me a particularly useful talent as a developer: an uncanny ability to sit down and grok other people’s code almost like magic. Solid experience with reverse engineering really is a good skill to have.
- wink 3y ago
  Depends on when the people did this and how complex the mechanism were at the time. I do remember just learning about JMP in assembler and that you could bypass a lot of stuff by changing a true to false or vice versa. Not exactly rocket science. (Not saying this to downplay anything, but what seems magical to many non-techies was actually very easy to do if you knew the trick, and it already worked for like 30% of the games - I'm not talking about the real stuff later on, not even sure how complicated NoCD was.) On the other hand, probably 15-20 years after I had last used a crack for a game I had to implement some basic protection like this into a piece of software (more like: make sure the customer will not run this demo version forever) and it was fun to discuss in the team what we all remembered from back then and which measures were adequate to implement.

rmilk 3y ago

Exactly true. Was a teenage software hacker, reverse engineered many games mostly because I was a bored teenager with free time and many games I legitimately bought. Mostly it was to cheat a little, like tweaking player stats or number of lives in a save file. All that reverse engineering experience gave me a particularly useful talent as a developer: an uncanny ability to sit down and grok other people’s code almost like magic. Solid experience with reverse engineering really is a good skill to have.

wink 3y ago
Depends on when the people did this and how complex the mechanism were at the time. I do remember just learning about JMP in assembler and that you could bypass a lot of stuff by changing a true to false or vice versa. Not exactly rocket science. (Not saying this to downplay anything, but what seems magical to many non-techies was actually very easy to do if you knew the trick, and it already worked for like 30% of the games - I'm not talking about the real stuff later on, not even sure how complicated NoCD was.) On the other hand, probably 15-20 years after I had last used a crack for a game I had to implement some basic protection like this into a piece of software (more like: make sure the customer will not run this demo version forever) and it was fun to discuss in the team what we all remembered from back then and which measures were adequate to implement.