DEFEATING A 40-YEAR-OLD COPY PROTECTION DONGLE

Summary from the TLDR Dev newsletter

This dev documented his successful effort to bypass a 40-year-old hardware copy protection dongle for a legacy RPG accounting software package. The software, running on a Windows 98 machine, required the dongle for its compiler and compiled executables. Through reverse engineering and assembly analysis, he identified a small routine that communicated with the dongle and expected a specific, constant output value, then successfully brute-forced this "magic number" and patched the executable with a four-byte sequence to provide the correct value instantly.