The good old days. SoftICE for me was essentially the OS, and Windows was just a GUI around it. Windows without SoftICE felt... empty
SoftICE
51–60 of 85 posts
Re: SoftICE
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 )
Wow more memories. Yes it was too easy to exploit the system for personal gain which was exactly the point of services. If someone managed to take over a channel, chanserv would immediately and automatically restore ownership. It's impossible to use someone else's handle when nickserv requires auth.
Re: SoftICE
#53Ancient? 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…
>UFO: Enemy Unknown (aka: X-Com outside North America).
You got it backwards. The PC version was known as X-COM: UFO Defense in North America and UFO: Enemy Unknown outside North America.
Re: SoftICE
#54It was the Hercules monitor support that had those amber fossils still sitting on the desks of every video card driver authors desks (and games programmers too) into the late nineties. VxD dot commands allowed you to extend and use a plethora of debug commands beyond the built in. Once Windows had working multimonitor support, that crucial aspect of Softice's utility was no longer unique.
Right, I remember getting a cheap green Hercules monitor and graphics card just for SoftICE.
Re: SoftICE
#55SoftICE being called ancient really amuses me. I recall my childhood in the 90s/00s learning how software and game activation codes work, and how to bypass them using SoftICE, it was really quite sad that it didn't go beyond XP.
Re: SoftICE
#56This 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…
As amazing as it was, it was a specialist tool that few people needed, with very few of those being able to actually afford it. It was licensed per-machine at a starting cost of $1500.
Re: SoftICE
#57Ancient? 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…
> game changer
lol
Re: SoftICE
#58Ancient? 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…
> +orc and fravia +hcu stuff ate up loads of my free time in the late 90s
Ha ha, yeah me too. It was interesting to see how cracking affected software development too. Paintshop Pro 2(?) was the easiest "Hello, world" crack, but the next version was really difficult. I never got to the bottom of it. Their registration verification code seemed to be littered throughout a load of their initialisation functions instead being the simple `if isValid(userCode) unlock()` it once was.
That said, it would no doubt have been easier to reverse engineer if I could have forward engineered at the time... QBasic wasn't really a good gateway to assembler :-D
Re: SoftICE
#59Seriously the coolest tool to tinker with in my youth. Gave you so much control. It felt like magic to halt execution of a DOS program to inspect exactly what it's doing instruction by instruction, patching code or injecting chunks of self-modifying code.
Re: SoftICE
#60Ancient? 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…
> I remember using SoftICE to cheat in games back in the 1990’s.
Pretty much the intro to cracking software and hacking games for 90s kids.
> 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).
Or maybe you were too busy owning noobs to do anything else.