Cracking this dongle; wouldn't this be a federal offence in the US?

Not being snarky - genuine question! I am not from the US :-)

Just a few months back I worked in embedded development on a project and there was a physical dongle to unlock the compiler, which was surprising during on-boarding as I've spent years doing commercial embedded work relying on GCC. :)

It is interesting that the vendor adapts the hardware token and then makes it weak on the software side.

I recently did similar thing for the FineReader 6 using a hardware dongle [0]. It was surprisingly easy, no disassembly at all, just injecting srand(0) and a hardcoding the responses from the dongle. I had no prior reverse-engineering experience at all.

[0] https://slomkowski.eu/abbyy-finereader-6-ikey-1000-hack/

>The only evidence for the existence of this company is this record of them exhibiting their wares at SIGGRAPH conferences in the early 1990s, as well as several patents issued to them, relating to software protection.

There is also their webpage for ordering PC RPG II. The company address is a residential house.

https://web.archive.org/web/20010802153755/http://home.netco...

I think I remember hacking some of the copy-protection out of a version of Tetris using the Borland debugger. I definitely patched mouse support into a Chris Crawford "Battle of the Bulge" game using it (for my rather tricky platform). That was a good debugger, and probably the last one I have used much - prefer logging/printing for stuff I write myself.

I remember my Dragon 32 (6809, Color Computer clone) had a dongle you plugged into the joystick port to protect a really crap game - Jumping Knights? I never tried to defeat it.

Often these dongles were just a single resistor 'circuit'

This is kind of like archaeology - just, software archaeology.

Tangential to this was the existence of California Software Product's "Baby/36" software. My father was a 36/400 programmer and sysadmin, and in his spare time used Baby/36 to write software for local businesses. I have vague memories of parallel port dongles being involved back then too. Don't think he mandated their use, was more a "framework" requirement.

I wrote a Prime minicomputer emulator in 2005, mostly on a lark because I grew up on them in high school and college and they were pretty advanced for their time, with token ring networking, remote call file systems before NFS, lots of Multics-like features (the Prime founders were associated with Honeywell and MIT).

I announced it on the Prime Usenet group and a guy wrote to say he was interested in using it for production, but had been burned before and wanted to make sure it worked. So I set him up a VM in my basement, he uploaded a bunch of his executables, and they all worked. I charged $1000/mo for the emulator. Since he was in the EU, I knew I wouldn't have a leg to stand on to get paid if they decided to stiff me, so I did some investigating into a Matrix dongle. It was pretty slick, and I coded up a copy protection scheme that allowed the emulator to run only when the dongle was inserted, and it contacted a license server in my basement to verify that it was allowed to run. To make sure my basement server wasn't a critical resource, I had the dongle setup like a battery that got periodically "charged": if the license server was down, the emulator kept running for up to N days on its local charge, giving me time to solve issues with the license server.

This went on for a few years, but they were never happy they had to actually keep paying for the technology. I heard every excuse in the book about why they needed a backup dongle. I knew the real reason they wanted one was to hire someone to hack it, but unfortunately, that would mean removing it, and that would halt the emulator within 5 minutes. So they came up with excuses like:

"Our state regulator requires us to have a backup computer system, so we need 2 dongles". No, you start computer 2, move the dongle, and you're fine.

One time I heard from a guy who said he heard about the emulator from a Prime parts guy in Chicago I knew, and wanted to try it out for a large EU bank. I asked where to send it, and surprise - it was the same city as my other customer! So I call R in Chicago and asked him how the conversation went with this "banking" customer, and R says "It was kinda weird. He said he had a Prime with a failing disk drive, but when I asked what model drive he had, he didn't know. He kept asking if there was any other solution for him besides hardware until R says "Well, there's a guy that has an emulator", which the banking guy jumped on immediately. So I go to Google and lookup this address the banker gives me to send the dongle to, and it's a massage parlor!

All in all, it was a good deal for me and a good deal for him, even if he wasn't happy about it. He was getting paid to support his own Prime software that he didn't have to port. But I learned my lesson as a youngin' about companies saying they will pay for something. I sold some printer/spooler minicomputer software in my early 20's and had a large investment bank (huge actually, as in everyone at the time would recognize their name) try it out for a month. They called and said they were processing the one-time license fee of $1500 but could I give them the access code early so they wouldn't have a disruption for a few days. I did it, and never got a dime from them. Hard lesson learned about being nice.

At a time where games have shit like always online DRM, it's a bit reassuring to remember that software developers making the experience worse for their customers isn't new.

You pay for software? You need to keep that big dongle plugged in your computer all the time! You pirate the same software? No need for any dongle!