The main tricks
Courtesy of Fravia's page of reverse engineering
Cubase 3.0 UNDONGLED!
courtesy of +XoanoN/PiNNACLE 1997
Well, i have seen some of my previous works published by the +HCU.
And for me this is already enough... Wow! To be on "the" site together
with the "Gotha" of cracking!!! So i decided to start working on a more
serious project, a cracking subsector that only REAL +crackers can face:
DONGLES!
Eh eh.... well, i have seen that the +HCU needs something about dongles, so
why should I not try? Let's see....
Prologue:
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First of all, i decided to try this donglecrack 'coz i don't know of ANY
version of Cubase 3.0 working (i mean REAL 100% cracked). Maybe there are
newer versions out (i think 3.05 or more), but i'm not sure if are cracked
well, coz i haven't tried them.
And, the reason of this is quite simple: many crackers tend to not even
trying out the programs once they THINK they've cracked them, and since
Cubase has a funny trick (to let you think you've cracked it after less
than 2 minutes of debugging... you got it?) I think it is worth explaining
a little its protection schemes. By the way, i tried cracking it 1 year
ago and did the same error.
In more understandable terms, simply NOPPING a JNZ lets you bypass the
initial donglecheck, so cubase "runs" somehow. But try working more than
10 minutes (or even less)... try creating new tracks, by clicking 4 or
5 times on the right window... try choosing "Score" from the menu....
TRY ANYTHING!!! It will soon crash with a "General Protection Failure"
error report...
Some donglecracking infos you may need:
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Since dongles are a relatively "strong" way to protect a program (a dongle
can contain locations where the program needs to jump, etc...) sometimes
without them it's impossible to crack such protections... I mean, in some
hard cases (i.e. when the locations of the jmps are stored *directly*
inside the dongle) you'll need ABSOLUTELY the dongle, or you can't do
anything... the program will not run.
In this case (and in other ones as well) first try to "emulate" the dongle,
if you understand how it works. If you can't, then try a BRUTE FORCE
approach (read my tutorial) to fool the program (as i did with Cubase).
This is the way to proceed in order to "bruteforcing" a dongle:
1) Write down the locations where the program crashes/does not run
2) Trace back and try to locate the switches (jumps) which jump to these
locations
3) Be sure these locations aren't used in other part of the program as well
Let's start!!!
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Ok, are u ready with your Martini Vodka and/or cigarettes AND Softice???
Good...... let's begin eradicating the initial donglecheck!
(you could also try to emulate the dongle by setting BPIO -h on printer
ports such as 0378/0379/037a etc... you will land in the CUBASE.VXD...
and believe me... it's better to try another approach!)
Well, you run Cubase and it popsup with the classic "Plug the dongle,idiot"
screen.... Ah ah ah!! Simply rerun it, Ctrl-D before the nag appears, hit F12
more than once to trace back calls (p ret is for sure one of the best
SoftICE's functions i think, without it some of the hard cracks couldn't be
done) and you'll land in the CUBASE30CM module. Step step and step until
you reach this code (you might need to set some temporaneus BPX to get rid
of cycles_loops, but you will figure out yourself where and how... otherwise
i would spend a whole day writing this tutorial!):
*Initial Check
0013.3C36 6A00 push 0000
0013.3C38 6A00 push 0000
0013.3C3A 56 push si
0013.3C3B 6A3F push 003F
0013.3C3D 6A00 push 0000
0013.3C3F 90 nop
0013.3C40 0E push cs
0013.3C41 E8A924 call 60ED CUBSCM30 (0F) at 3327:c5c6
(c) Xoanon, 1997. All rights reversed.
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