Subj : Re: Doorgame cracking
To   : esc
From : Bugz
Date : Sat Feb 04 2023 07:50 pm

-=> esc wrote to Bugz <=-

 es> Hm, wonder if I should just try to find an older version with DOS
 es> functionality in that case. :/

I know IDA 4.0 works.  The IDA 4.5 I found from somewhere segfaults when 
starting the analysis process.

 es> Awesome! Are you going to throw it up in a blog post or something? Or a
 es> howto guide zipfile to share out over FTN?

I'm not sure if FSX would be interested or not.  I've put it on my website
for now:

https://bugz.red-green.com/book.zip

Unzip, and open book/index.html in your web browser.  Hopefully my spelling 
and grammar isn't too bad.  Please let me know what's unclear -- always hard
to talk about something when you've just done it for many years.

(That's a function call with 2 parameters -- don't you see it? .. no, all
I see are pushes and call.  Yeah!  That's the call!  Why didn't you say so?)

 es> I'd really benefit from all your work. There are some LORD IGMs and
 es> IGMs for other games like TW2002 that I would really like to register,
 es> not to mention a couple of actual doorgames that don't have keygens or
 es> any way to contact the original author.

Patches are the easiest ones to do.  Keygens are a bit tougher, because 
you have to figure out what the code is doing exactly, and all you're
given is assembly.  And you need to keep in mind how the code reacts to
signed/unsigned, overflow, and bitwise rotations.

If there's something specific you're looking at, send it my way.  I'll
take a peek, and share my notes on what I find out.

Some of the (newer-then-mine) IDA versions had "flirt".  It would look at 
the source, and match the functions against the various runtime libraries.  

Instead of call <something meaningless>, it would be call _fopen, _strlen.
It would tell you what functions were being called.  (I can't find any
references to it.  I think flirt might have been replaced with HexRays.)

Why include something, when you can spin it off into another $product$. :(

https://hex-rays.com/

Wow, it is shown taking disassembly and generating matching C code.

 es> Again I'm thrilled you're going through all of this. I've always wanted
 es> to know how to crack things, for whatever reason I simply /hate/
 es> running anything that says "SHAREWARE" or "UNREGISTERED" lol.

The days of using a disk zapper to edit the text.  I've done my share of
that as well.  ;)

Take care,
Bugz

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