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I may or may not have done some cracking since the early 90s.
Back then three things were true for me to start that hobby:- Had a computer and lots of free time.
- Had 0 money but friends that would lend me a game for a week or two.
- Had access to burnable media.
This was mostly me trying to keep playing games after giving the disk (or disks) back.
However, once I might have cracked GTA (the original), the rush of finally understanding how a debugger worked and figuring it out, made actually playing less apealing than the whole figuring it out.It made me rent games then just try figuring out how to crack them, but that was financially killing me as again I had nothing to begin with and I was now at minus some.
Granted that none of the early protections were anything similar to Denuvo.
In most cases, it was just a case of blocking a cd check here and there. Some had hilarious protections where the game would screw the player if detected: RA2 would be probably the most famous I remember. Often than not it made me paranoid if I had triped a trap and the game was being unfair or bugged.Somehow I kept going until I shifted towards the Hackintosh scene.
Then when the first humble bundle appeared and people pirated it, it disgusted me to no avail and finally left this part of my life.
I remember how at a lan party I stumbled onto a problem with Worms 2 game. After being patched it asked for cd to be present in the drive all the time. And the only nocd I found required to place game data from the cd in the root of a C:/ drive. It made me curious and some days later I tried to investigate the case and yeah, game did some checks and assembled path to game files using drive letter. In the nocd they just cut out loop that went over the drives. Which afaik misbehaved on machines with floppy drive. And I went further and patched game to use
./instead of drive letter. Which was tricky as there was not enough space to just patch it in place and I had to search for free space and do long jumps.I definitely messed up details here and there, but those were fun times nonetheless :)
Some had hilarious protections where the game would screw the player if detected
I will never forget that one day one of my high school friends called me after I'd hooked him up with a pirated version of Crysis and yelled into the phone: "WHY IS MY GUN FIRING CHICKENS?! I CAN'T KILL ANYTHING!"