SoftICE • Hacker News Board

Re: SoftICE

#61

Post by Zardoz84 » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 10:56 AM UTC

I remember using it on the 90's to crack Space Empires III

Re: SoftICE

#62

Post by pjc50 » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 11:09 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…

It was widely pirated. The same applies to IDA Pro. When a major part of the target market is people trying to remove copy protection, it's very hard to stop them from doing this.

Re: SoftICE

#63

Post by cryogenic_soul » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 11:14 AM UTC

btw, there was also a Syser debugger, developed as a replacement for SoftICE, I never used it, except playing with it a little, few years ago, it was nice experience.

Although I heard they stopped the development, a little google -ing found a page with fresh release and win10 support claim, but I have no idea, how the legitimate is it https://qpdownload.com/syser-debugger/

also there is rewriting project on github, with last commit from 5th June, 2019 https://github.com/marakew/syser

Would appreciate to hear any info about current status of Syser

UPDATE: Just FYI, after lurking a bit over the github repo and associated links, found that gihub repo maintainer seems to be a pretty qualified reverse engineer, for example, he made his own independent skype protocol reconstruction (https://marakew.github.io) and the README.md in gihub repo say, that Syser sources were lost due to the corrupt flash drive, so I guess he was one of the (author?) developers of Syser.

Still would be happy to hear more, if somebody know the full story.

Re: SoftICE

#64

Post by sunnyque » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 11:26 AM UTC

That feeling when you are pressing SoftIce popup hotkey and guessing will application survive or not. then your computer just freeze :D just old good times

Re: SoftICE

#65

Post by cryogenic_soul » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 11:27 AM UTC

danmg wrote: post #25

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

As I already mentioned in other comment, there was Syser debugger, but seems to be lost now.

https://qpdownload.com/syser-debugger/ (I am not sure how much is this link legitimate, so please be careful)

https://github.com/marakew/syser

Re: SoftICE

#66

Post by thomasdullien » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 11:30 AM UTC

For those that like the history of the Cracking scene - there was a set of binary-patching SoftICE extensions called "nticedump" and "icedump". They were pretty nuts, too - one reverse engineer got annoyed by his music playback stopping when he was in SoftICE, so he hacked an MP3 player into the SoftICE driver.

http://n8on.free.fr/hackzines/bhz/7/crackingbeginner3.txt

There was also in-SoftICE tetris.

I used SoftICE extensively from 96-00'-ish ... to the extent that as a teenager I had single-step dreams and dreams where I tried to hit CTRL-D.

Re: SoftICE

#67

Post by thomasdullien » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 11:32 AM UTC

thomasdullien wrote: post #66

For those that like the history of the Cracking scene - there was a set of binary-patching SoftICE extensions called "nticedump" and "icedump". They were pretty nuts, too - one reverse engineer got annoyed by his music playback stopping when he was in SoftICE, so he hacked an MP3 player into the SoftICE driver. http://n8on.free.fr/hackzines/bhz/7/crackingbeginner3.txt There was also in-SoftICE tetris. I used SoftICE…

While I am also walking down memory lane -- writing recursive SoftICE macros so that one could make SoftICE single-step 50k times and write the log to a file.

Re: SoftICE

#68

Post by pantulis » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 11:56 AM UTC

Not strictly related to SoftICE but those days make me reminisce about another useful tool, “Sourcer” from V Communications, anyone remember that?

Re: SoftICE

#69

Post by edem » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 11:58 AM UTC

I still remember those times when I forgot to switch SoftICE off and whenever Windows fucked up I ended up in SoftICE's debugger.

Re: SoftICE

#70

Post by rgrau » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 1:05 PM UTC

thomasdullien wrote: post #66

For those that like the history of the Cracking scene - there was a set of binary-patching SoftICE extensions called "nticedump" and "icedump". They were pretty nuts, too - one reverse engineer got annoyed by his music playback stopping when he was in SoftICE, so he hacked an MP3 player into the SoftICE driver. http://n8on.free.fr/hackzines/bhz/7/crackingbeginner3.txt There was also in-SoftICE tetris. I used SoftICE…

"I used SoftICE extensively from 96-00'-ish ... to the extent that as a teenager I had single-step dreams and dreams where I tried to hit CTRL-D.".

That.

wrt everything stopping while using SICE, I remember looking at the windows clock and seeing 02:00AM , and thinking "I'm still on schedule", turning my head and seeing the sunrise from my window. Look at my watch: 06:20AM. Woops!