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by Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS) 06/23/2012, 6:51pm PDT |
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Entropy Stew wrote:
Re: I used to use something similar in the Win 98 days called...Gamehack?
Mainly to extend time-limited demos. Oh how this brings back memories.
I remember when I used to pirate software in college, I had a whole suitcase full of disks, first as 5 1/4 then moving to 3 1/2, and basically I collected anything and offered software on two ways: you could copy it yourself, or I'd sell you the blank discs, at a slight markup. (Like $1 each on disks that sold for $7.50 for a box of 10.) I had lots of programs. There was one that was a special demo for some game that was good for ten tries. The program would rewrite the disk. So that one I'd have two copies, one to play with and one to copy from. The "copy from" was never used, and then you just wiped the "play with" disk with a fresh issue from the "copy from" disc.
Then someone went in with a hex editor and bit scanner and discovered what they were changing, and they just put a text file on disk that told you what bytes to reset. You just had to remember never to use all the free tries because if it reached zero then it disabled itself so you couldn't repair it. You'd have to format the disk and use it for something else.
There have been a lot of amazing tools, including the Peter Norton stuff, which was for fixing disk files, undeleting files, and other things. (This was years before we needed anti-virus software.)
There was a program called DR (for Disc Repair), which would allow you to edit a file or a disc directly. So you could patch the partition table, the FAT table, read the directory or anything else. You could select direct access to the floppy drive or to the hard drive. We had some computers in one lab where you couldn't access some of the subdirectories. Well, without DR, you couldn't. Thing was, it was sort of a qualifier for smart people. The people who were smart enough to know how to get around the restrictions were the type of people who were not likely to use their knowledge for dishonorable purposes. The fact I can screw up the hard drive on a computer I'm using does not mean I would because I respect the technology.
The most interesting thing was what was popular. Me and the other people who copied software stole everything we got our hands on. Turbo Pascal Version 3, Lotus 1-2-3, Word Perfect (it basically killed Wordstar), and a few others. There was a bit of what is called "the long tail" where I might have had a couple hundred pieces of software, that perhaps 20% was in heavy demand, 78% had people who wanted it from time to time, 1.5% occasionally got use because it was a specialized tool (like a hex editor or a debugging tool), and 0.5% had absolutely no demand except by someone who just collected software. I remember Lotus Symphony, used a huge number of 5 1/4" discs (possibly anything from 7 to 15, I don't remember), and even though you could get it free, it wasn't even worth the cost of the disks to store it on. Nobody wanted it, nobody asked for it, nobody used it.
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