Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle

Simplicity of the protection & reversing approach

• Many commenters note the dongle scheme (fixed value over LPT) is crude but “good enough” for a 1980s business audience.
• Several stress that the hard part of cracking is locating the check; once found, bypassing it is often a one‑instruction change (JE/JNE→JMP or flipping a single bit in a conditional jump).
• One commenter criticizes the assumption that “no inputs = constant result”, pointing out you could have rolling codes or stateful verification, but agrees it happened to be simple here.

Anecdotes from the copy‑protection era

• Numerous stories of defeating protections by:
  • Patching conditional branches, NOP‑ing calls, or editing values in hex.
  • Exploiting bad key‑validation designs (e.g., valid codes left in memory or registry).
  • Bypassing hardware checks on damaged floppy sectors or “laser protected” disks.
• People recall feeling like “hackers” as teens using SoftICE or Borland debuggers to remove nags and limits.

Why dongles were/are used and why they declined

• Historically common in expensive CAD/engineering, DAWs, and industrial software; less so in games, which favored media/manual-based schemes.
• Practical pain points: limited ports, daisy‑chaining “dongle snakes”, frequent breakage/loss, support overhead.
• Commenters note that reversing dongle checks is usually no harder than bypassing software-only licensing, so protection gains are modest.

Modern licensing, SaaS, and business incentives

• A civil/structural software developer describes still using dongles and seeing cracked copies sold online; argues that without protection, revenue and hence viability suffer.
• Heated debate over SaaS vs perpetual licenses:
  • Critics say SaaS exploits users in stable domains where “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” applies, and that bug fixes should not be paywalled.
  • Defenders argue recurring revenue is necessary because platforms change, dependencies charge annually, and customers expect ongoing fixes and support.

Legacy and industrial contexts

• Several point out that old OSs (Win95, Win98, Windows 2000, even PDP‑11s) and dongled compilers still run mission‑critical or regulated systems (medical, nuclear, industrial automation).
• Air‑gapped or high‑sensitivity environments often prefer physical or local licensing over cloud checks; outages in license servers are seen as a serious operational risk.

Legality, preservation, and ethics

• Multiple comments note that defeating the protection is likely illegal under DMCA 1201, despite the age of the software; there is no “very old” exemption in the US.
• Others emphasize European allowances for reverse engineering for compatibility (not fully detailed).
• Some worry about publishing cracks if any vendor or successor might still monetize or enforce IP; others argue obscurity and lack of footprint suggest the software is effectively abandoned.

Hardware curiosity & emulation

• Hardware‑oriented readers wish the dongle had been opened; speculate it may be simple logic, EEPROM, or even just resistors.
• There is mention of dongle emulators and using dumps to keep legacy Win9x/DOS software running in modern environments.
• Several compare this work to “software archaeology,” valuing it as documentation and preservation of a vanished era of protection schemes.