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111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

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Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#241

Post by Villodre »

I found a Half-Life CD in the street, just laying there, when it was a new game and all the rage. I guess it slipped from somebody's jewel case or the like. By some miracle, it wasn't scratched enough to be unreadable, so I went and installed it but… no key. Out of frustration I started to just type silly sequences, until arriving at one that worked: 1234567890 until filling the textbox completely.

Man, the sheer joy and happiness when the game installed and ran without issue. I had to tweak the settings a lot because I had a P75 with a 3dfx Voodoo accelerator card but nonetheless I enjoyed a lot of that game and I still have that disc. I hope the original owner was able to get hold of a copy and still use his original licence though.

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#242

Post by Borg3 »

washadjeffmad wrote: post #84
SpaceL10n wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird reading about my life as if it's history. Everyone was doing it. I remember my teachers, friends, and family all giving me pirated software at some point. I remember my friends and I getting excited when someone got a ripped copy of some game and we couldn't wait to burn new CD-ROMs to share. If one of us got our hands on the copy of some game, we all got copies. It was kind of like a free-for-all in the w…

In many cases, disassembling and modding was often necessary to get software working on your system. We all shared executables that patched bugs, added features, and improved performance back in the 90s and 00s.

Haha :) I still do so for some old legacy games. The biggest patching project was AI War: Fleet Command. Great game, but quite a bit of bugs and missing features. Spend weeks in CIL decompiler, understanding code and then making patches.

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#243

Post by Borg3 »

qurashee wrote: post #188
stevekemp wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true, there are a lot of sites out there back in the day that a lot of oldtimers would remember. My personal favourite was astalavista, named in relation to the legit search-site altavista I guess. Actually I take that back, my favourite site was +fravia's reverse engineering pages. Mostly because the legitimate crack-sites were safe, but there was always a risk of downloading something with a virus, or a trojan…

Your post really brought back memories of softice and w32dasm. Incidentally one of the websites from that era (gamecopyworld) is still alive! Mind blown.

Ahh SoftIce (and later WinIce for Win9x).. Great RING0 debugger.. I used it quite a bit for crack some games myself :) Oh look, it still here on disk: siw405w9x.exe Why I keep it... ;)

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#244

Post by Borg3 »

consp wrote: post #220
Dalewyn wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password at all, processes could each read entire memory on the machine. To be fair, this is specifically to do with personal computers of the time; MS-DOS, Windows 3x, and Windows 9x were all single user operating systems: They simply had no concept of multiple users at all. The concept was bolted on later as an afterthought, but it was really janky and paled in…

I distinctly remember having lots BSODs with IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL errors due to shoddy drivers all the time on XP (which is the first consumer NT kernel windows version), especially in the early days. Maybe not related to shared memory but overall not great either.

Are you sure it was drivers issue? Not HW fault? I have good memories of Win2003 (and XP too) Very stable system, if drivers are correctly written.

Back in the days I remember fighting with random BSODs on Audio play/stop on Win2003. After months of fights I nailed that bloody .sys audio driver that gave me the problems. Found orginal vendor simpler driver and problem went away.

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#245

Post by egberts1 »

stevekemp wrote: post #40
twawaaay wrote: post #8

It may sound strange to people who were born later. But in 90s these mechanisms were in infancy. It was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password at all, processes could each read entire memory on the machine. Software was cracked the moment it came out and it was assumed people bought any software because they feared legal action rather than because they had no other way to get their hands on it -- lat…

Very true, there are a lot of sites out there back in the day that a lot of oldtimers would remember. My personal favourite was astalavista, named in relation to the legit search-site altavista I guess. Actually I take that back, my favourite site was +fravia's reverse engineering pages. Mostly because the legitimate crack-sites were safe, but there was always a risk of downloading something with a virus, or a trojan…

Archive to Fravia’s website

Wow.

https://www.richardharrison.pro/fravia/

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#248

Post by bonney_io »

chungy wrote: post #212

OEM keys for Windows 95 followed a similar structure to the retail key, albeit with a lot more digits. OEM Windows 95 keys came in the form of XXXXX-OEM-00YYYYY-ZZZZZ. The XXXXX grouping represents when Microsoft issued the key by day-of-year and year, and the operating system would validate any number where the first three numbers range from 001 to 365 (or 366 for year 96), and the last two X digits were 95-99. The…

For no reason other than it seemed fun, I used this new knowledge to implement my own version of said key-gen, in my choice of dev environment: Swift and Xcode playgrounds. Fun little exercise.

https://gist.github.com/Bonney/5cc85f41cdeb80146c7d5169ded8a...

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#249

Post by chungy »

bonney_io wrote: post #248
chungy wrote: post #212

OEM keys for Windows 95 followed a similar structure to the retail key, albeit with a lot more digits. OEM Windows 95 keys came in the form of XXXXX-OEM-00YYYYY-ZZZZZ. The XXXXX grouping represents when Microsoft issued the key by day-of-year and year, and the operating system would validate any number where the first three numbers range from 001 to 365 (or 366 for year 96), and the last two X digits were 95-99. The…

For no reason other than it seemed fun, I used this new knowledge to implement my own version of said key-gen, in my choice of dev environment: Swift and Xcode playgrounds. Fun little exercise. https://gist.github.com/Bonney/5cc85f41cdeb80146c7d5169ded8a...

Impressive, I see one definite problem and a potential one:

* I had incorrectly stated the conditions of the Y grouping. The digits must sum up to a multiple of 7, rather than be a multiple of 7 by themselves. 0000007 and 0000016 are valid sequences, for instance, but 0000014 is not.

* The Z grouping probably has to be [0-9]. At least I've never tested non-numeric characters whenever I've installed Windows 95 (I usually type out 00195-OEM-0000007-00000 when I install it).

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#250

Post by mtrower »

wkat4242 wrote: post #197
mtrower wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wat. My 166 slows down just from the filesystem itself. I explicitly run jfs, as it is particularly light on cpu. (I believe ext2 is also an option, but you lose journaling). Not calling you a liar, just very surprised to hear such a report.

Those were very different times though. All software was much lighter. The filesystems of the time were fine on it (and I believe NTFS already had journalling even in those days). I'm not sure what kind of '166' you have. But you're probably running at least a modern webbrowser as IE 4 is no longer suitable in this day & age. Most sites didn't even use https. You also probably use modern-day crypto. Because it's mode…

JFS is pretty damn old[1] as is ext2.

> I'm not sure what kind of '166' you have. But you're probably running at least a modern webbrowser as IE 4 is no longer suitable in this day & age. Most sites didn't even use https.

I'm not sure what sort of impression you got about me, but maybe I should clear things up a little; I was also around for the 90's. I know what the general software situation was, and (unlike most) my impressions aren't buried in 30 years of memory haze and nostalgia either, since I still use such software on occasion. The computer in question is a Compaq Presario from ~1996; it's been upgraded with a 233MHz Pentium MMX that's currently clocked down to 166MHz for... reasons. I've maxed out the RAM at 128MB, about half of which is required to get X up and running on any unix release from this century (win95 fares excellently, win2k is pushing it though).

No, it doesn't run a modern web browser. There's no way in hell you'd get one to run on that hardware. The best you can really do is something like Dillo, or D+, depending on platform (or go text-only). Whether or not I run "modern" software on it, really depends on what that software is. A lot of old tools work just fine, while some modern tools are still somewhat lightweight. It really depends.

I have no experience with FDE on windows. The closest comparison I could draw would be to the built in disk compression utility, which I do seem to recall having a speed impact. I'm not saying it wasn't usable; I'm just saying, from my experience with the hardware of that era, running software of the era, I'm surprised to hear that it could give a reasonable experience. As you say, software was much lighter; meaning, there are many things we do today, that you just didn't do back then --- such as making a full pass over the datastream in your filesystem code.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFS_(file_system)

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