Path: utzoo!hoptoad!uunet!dino!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!psuvax1!psuhcx!vmr
From: vmr@psuhcx.psu.edu (Victor M. Ricker)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: "cracking" (was CS curriculae (was Re: Distributed Hacking :-)
Message-ID: <2020@psuhcx.psu.edu>
Date: 12 Jan 90 06:24:47 GMT
References: <5458@udccvax1.acs.udel.EDU> <BOB.90Jan10105229@volitans.MorningStar.Com> <1146@crash.cts.com> <90011.150343CMH117@PSUVM.BITNET>
Reply-To: vmr@psuhcx.psu.edu (Vic Ricker)
Organization: Engineering Computer Lab, Penn State University
Lines: 16
Approved: Jack the Ripper

Oh Chuck, what a God you are!  Even little kids can crack protection anymore.
All that aside, what's the most interesting program you've cracked/attempted?

Back when I had a Tandy Coco3 there was a disk that did some really wacky
stuff.  It had a very tiny loader program ( < $80 bytes).  It would jump
into the disk io buffer and start executing some code that was left there
from the end of the directory track.  That read a few hidden sectors that had
the main loader code.  That code would read some "wacky format" tracks and 
use the disk status register and a magic "fudge-factor" to index into a table
of sectors to be read from the disk and what order.  It had its own IRQ/FIRQ
and NMI routines that screwed with the timing that caused the bad sectors 
to read correctly.

Ever copy ROM cartridges??

-Vic Ricker vmr@hcx.psu.edu