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SoftICE

en.wikipedia.org

31–40 of 85 posts

Re: SoftICE

#31
post #25

What modern debuggers/tool can do what SoftICE did? How do you debug services and device drivers modern Windows?

You use WinDbg and do kernel debugging. The newer WinDbgX UI is quite nice lately. However, there's no replacement for live debugging on the same machine the way that SoftICE did it.

Re: SoftICE

#32
Who else had a monochrome monitor to display Soft-ICE info while debugging video-intensive programs? Text at B000:0000 instead of B800:0000.

Re: SoftICE

#33
Nothing like a kernel mode mp3 player to listen to music while you step through assembly and see some very colorful symbol names of windows internals.

Re: SoftICE

#34

Who else had a monochrome monitor to display Soft-ICE info while debugging video-intensive programs? Text at B000:0000 instead of B800:0000.

I had always wondered about that feature. I reckon Turbo Debugger supported it too but MDA adapters were hard to find when I started my debugging adventures.

Re: SoftICE

#35
post #12
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/

WinDbg Preview is also quite good and free on Microsoft Store: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/windbg-preview/9pgjgd53tn8...

Re: SoftICE

#36

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

Orc+, I still have a copy of those tutorials somewhere

He passed away in Egypt on one of his travels suddenly, apparently: https://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/a/2430/30837

Re: SoftICE

#38

Who else had a monochrome monitor to display Soft-ICE info while debugging video-intensive programs? Text at B000:0000 instead of B800:0000.

Yes, me! I also had a hardware switch wired to the ISA bus so I could generate a non-masking interrupt to break into the debugger no matter what the application was doing.

We also used the mono monitor when developing games in the 90s. We were able to display log messages and stats on a separate screen. It was a super useful trick.

Re: SoftICE

#39
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…

Used it to hack transparent walls into QW and Quake2 - and it worked online flawlessly. Servers mostly checked for proxies, but not for changed binaries.

SoftICE was awesome.

Re: SoftICE

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your argument is invalid. Not the absence of services but rather the fact that back then you could crash a box by means of simply sending a single well crafted TCP packet to your adversary. It was adventure among the kids, and the "elders" did not really care plus no one in their right mind dared assaulting their source of knowledge. ( And shell accounts :P )
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