I have been playing around with retro stuff for a while, mainly for gaming and for trying out different hardware, until recently I decided to also try and pick up from where I left back in 97, 98- I was learning to crack software. Back then encryption was in its infancy, and so was SafeDisc, so things were less complicated than they were about to become. I was about 13 back then, so some things were difficult for me to understand (given English is not my mother language), but I persevered through it and eventually was able to crack my first software (WinZip, can't recall which version). I was doing it mainly on Windows 98, using Numega's SoftIce 4 and W32DASM. Eventually I began writing some simple tutorials, even though I wasn't really that good at doing it, I felt I could get in touch with the community and also gave me the opportunity to practice and improve my English. My main goal was to be able to crack DOS games and tools, but I never got much into that, other than cracking TurboBAT (using Turbo Debugger, which came with some version of Turbo Pascal).

So anyway.. when I decided I wanted to give it another go, I could easily remember SoftICE and W32DASM as my go-to tools, but I also wanted to learn from the same tutorials I had read back then, and many others I hadn't. oRC+ and Fravia (which has passed away in 2009, sadly) were my main sources of inspiration and knowledge, and thankfully, some people did the nice work of archiving stuff from back in the day, such as a complete crackstore.com dump (also one of my go-to sites for information on cracking) from around 1999.

I haven't been able to get much done other than do some reading, get the tools installed and play around it a bit, but man, loading up 1999's crackstore.com on IE5 sure took me back. It was a whole new nostalgic feeling for me; I had gotten into retrocomputing mainly because of the games, most of which I never stopped playing since I got my first PC in 93, and so seeing that web page load like it was 1999 was something I hadn't experienced since then.

Now that I've poured my heart out on the subject, I wanted to ask: is anyone else also interested in retro cracking/reverse engineering as well? If so, any tips you'd like to share? Tools, tutorials, reading tips, anything, really, is much appreciated 😀