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SoftICE

en.wikipedia.org

1–10 of 85 posts

Re: SoftICE

#5
Ancient? I'm feeling a little old now.

I've always felt like I have neglected debuggers to my own detriment. Print debugging is just very convenient and once you get in that habit it's hard to stop. On rare occasions where I didn't know where in the code or in the system to start they've always shined.

Re: SoftICE

#6

I recall those lessons for script-kiddies “Crack [software name here] with SoftICE” in early 2000s.

Ha! I used to be one of those 90's skiddies. Nights of struggle with SoftICE eventually allowed me to crack some stuff "real time", although i failed to write functioning cracks using it. It was along this journey however that i arrived at the point where I started to understand how a PC & OS really functions. Unknowingly, SoftICE came to co-direct my life for the better.

Re: SoftICE

#7
Ancient? Ughh. I remember using SoftICE to cheat in games back in the 1990’s. Wonderful software, I wish I would’ve been knowledgeable to do something more useful than making myself invincible in Mortal Kombat or giving my characters super powers in UFO: Enemy Unknown (aka: X-Com outside North America).

This was a great learning tool to understand how programs actually allocate and use memory. Long before I had taken an architecture class and understood big endian and little endian, I had learned all about it by searching for values in memory. From there you could basically deconstruct the C structs used to handle the memory and then write a pretty simple TSR to cheat the heck out of DOS games. If I recall correctly, at least some of the time I was even able to use it to cheat at APCIDoom - which was a specialized launcher for Doom that let you play four player deathmatches through your local multi-line BBS.

Re: SoftICE

#9
Oh man, SoftICE was the shit. It was a bit inconvenient to have to reboot with it enabled, but it allowed you to debug things no other debugger did.

I was equally impressed with OllyDBG later on, it was more convenient (if less powerful but always seemed like amazing software for just one author.

Re: SoftICE

#10
post #6

I recall those lessons for script-kiddies “Crack [software name here] with SoftICE” in early 2000s.

Ha! I used to be one of those 90's skiddies. Nights of struggle with SoftICE eventually allowed me to crack some stuff "real time", although i failed to write functioning cracks using it. It was along this journey however that i arrived at the point where I started to understand how a PC & OS really functions. Unknowingly, SoftICE came to co-direct my life for the better.

I remember hanging out in #cracking4newbies on EFnet a lot. It was pretty toxic if you weren't part of the in-group, but I learnt a lot.
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