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SoftICE

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Re: SoftICE

#41

Post by timewasted »

visualphoenix wrote: post #16
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 comput…

SoftICE and Diablo are the reasons I have a passion for software security and do software development for a living! Ripping Diablo and battle.net to pieces to understand how to make it do what I wanted it to do instead of what Blizzard wanted it to do was how I spent a good chunk of my childhood.

So yes, thank you very much for literally changing my life, SoftICE!

Re: SoftICE

#42

Post by dblohm7 »

Mucking around with SoftICE was essential to my understanding of reverse engineering and low-level programming. It was an amazing piece of software, as was all the other NuMega products!

Re: SoftICE

#44

Post by alexott »

sedatk wrote: post #34
iconjack wrote: post #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.

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.

Yes, Turbo Debugger, it supported MDA - another department on our faculty had a separate machine for AutoCAD with 2 monitors, and I spent quite a lot of time on that machine debugging graphical programs in TD...

Re: SoftICE

#45

Post by stevekemp »

maxfromua wrote: post #2

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

My favourite was using SoftICE to crack itself, but I learned a lot about debugging and low-level coding via +fravia's writeups, amongst others.

It helped that when I was a teen one of the reasons I got interested in programming, and assembly language, wasn't so much to create new "things", as it was to cheat at games.

The first step was always removing the copy-protection stuff, so you could access the game code. Then you could explore and patch the binaries for infinite lives, health, & etc.

I've still got some printed magazines from the 90s where my POKEs were printed for ZX Spectrum games.

Re: SoftICE

#46

Post by stevekemp »

sedatk wrote: post #36
remote_phone wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

When I first read +fravia I took it literally; these days I'm firmly of the opinion that +fravia == +orc.

Either way RIP to both of them, I was genuinely shocked when I learned of Fravia's death:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia

Re: SoftICE

#47

Post by aricz »

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…

SoftICE oozed of hax0rz. I did the same thing, training old games like Alley Cat, Digdug, Eagle's Nest, Captain Comic etc. All about getting infinite life, energy, ammo.

Then it was cracking copy protection. A couple of NOP's and a JMP to the correct place (for the easy ones).

#cracking4newbies on EFnet. +ORC (Old Red Cracker), +Fravia and everyone in +HCU (High Cracking University). Wow.. I remember I used to have dreams.

Then win32 came along, and made everything much more complicated.

Re: SoftICE

#48

Post by aricz »

visualphoenix wrote: post #16
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 comput…

Did anyone find out who +ORC really was? I rememember there were puzzles to solve to find his real identity.

Re: SoftICE

#49

Post by [deleted] »

aricz wrote: post #48
visualphoenix wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comput…

Did anyone find out who +ORC really was? I rememember there were puzzles to solve to find his real identity.

[deleted]

Re: SoftICE

#50

Post by yread »

aricz wrote: post #48
visualphoenix wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comput…

Did anyone find out who +ORC really was? I rememember there were puzzles to solve to find his real identity.

I think it was just +Fravia's alternate ego for doing more legally questionable stuff
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