SoftICE • Hacker News Board

Re: SoftICE

#11

Post by xvilka » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 1:17 AM UTC

There is a similar approach for a modern age - use the hypervisor for the debugger agent. The application called HDBG[1]. It was never production-ready though, so not so famous. Another similar application is PulseDBG[2]. It's not exactly like SoftICE, but allows you to observe the execution process locally[3], which is sometimes enough.

[1] http://fdbg.x86asm.net/hdbg/hdbg.html

[2] https://github.com/honorarybot/PulseDbg

[3] https://github.com/honorarybot/PulseDbg/wiki/8.-Local-debugg...

Re: SoftICE

#12

Post by xvilka » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 1:18 AM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #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.

OllyDbg is dead too though, I recommend to use x32dbg/x64dbg[1]. It's open source and actively developed by a team of maintenances. And it's extendable with plugins and scripting.

[1] https://x64dbg.com/

Re: SoftICE

#13

Post by kabdib » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 1:32 AM UTC

A really nice tool for debugging Windows drivers. God knows you needed all the help you could get :-)

Re: SoftICE

#14

Post by PeCaN » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 2:05 AM UTC

xvilka wrote: post #12

StavrosK wrote: post #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.

OllyDbg is dead too though, I recommend to use x32dbg/x64dbg[1]. It's open source and actively developed by a team of maintenances. And it's extendable with plugins and scripting. [1] https://x64dbg.com/

OllyDbg is technically dead but it still works as well as ever (for 32-bit software). I still break it out sometimes. I find it much smoother to use than x64dbg (maybe just due to using it more, but I do think OllyDbg nailed the debugger experience really well).

Re: SoftICE

#15

Post by Jerry2 » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 2:28 AM UTC

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?

Re: SoftICE

#16

Post by visualphoenix » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 2:32 AM UTC

pridkett wrote: post #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…

Yup! Discovering SoftICE was a game changer. Various advanced SoftICE diablo 1 and diablo 2 multiplayer “enhancements” circulated back in the day... ones like bypassing the maximum level cap, making your user not render in multiplayer so you couldn’t be clicked on during pvp, among others.

+orc and fravia +hcu stuff ate up loads of my free time in the late 90s and definitely helped later on once I got a formal computer science and engineering degree.

Thanks for the memories SoftICE!

Re: SoftICE

#17

Post by ashleyn » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 2:37 AM UTC

Jerry2 wrote: post #15

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 en…

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.

Re: SoftICE

#18

Post by travbrack » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 2:44 AM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #10

coretx wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah efnet. That place was the wild west since they never adopted services. I remember channel takeovers and recoveries with extreme tactics like forcing netsplits with DOS attacks on the servers. Having to run an eggdrop bot to re-op people when they join a channel. Running your own bot to keep your nick from being stolen. Good times.