WyndWalker
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You can't even protect from hardware schemes. A long time ago I designed and
built a ROM emulator for the original Atari game system. We just plugged
into the cartridge slot with a ribbon cable to a board with one chip and a
ZIF socket on it to contain an EPROM. Then everybody in the 'club' just
copyied each others ROMs to their own EPROMs and away we went. I've never
even owned an Atari! A friend of mine found one in pieces on his front lawn
and we fixed it. Then the subject came up and I said 'Gee, that'll be a
snap!' and we built it.
I'm just trying to emphasize, hardware-wize they'll build something -most of
the time it'll be CHEAP and EASY. Software-wize it's a snap. The Digital
PROfessional series has a serial number in hardware, there is a system call
to get the serial number. Most protected software uses this system call to
double check if it's running on the right machine. I simply patched the
get-serial-number system call to return a 'company-wide' standard serial
number. This only makes things easier for us internally -we produce
'copy-protected' software for the PRO, but we can use the same copy of
software on any machine. Nobody *EVER* does it with outside software
tho…….