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Comment on Ask HN: Help me hack my 30 year old shareware gameparent

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It is PKLite compressed. I looked already.

"PKLITE Copr. 1990-92 PKWARE Inc. All Rights Reserved" right there at the front. And I can see a lot of scrambled text that is exactly what one would expect to see from a PKLite compressed executable:

    OGRIDLOK regi
    Pstration prog
    J.Acker
    ma2(c) 1993:
    Select YES if y
    ou have a
    Pde, NO to exi
    InfoN
    CITh/CB
    imu$
    send3
    R10z:U
    oNo}dhoek&
    17985+
    Town.
    Lca?
    I will
    CODE
    <Ousing
    unlock-
    r leve
    @&e.2
... etc ...

mmm, I don't remember doing that. But was uploading to BBS's at the time so may have done so. Also may have been trying to dissuade cracking :)

You won't be patching it without decompressing it. Unless you run it under something that patches it in memory for every time it is executed. But that's a ridiculous amount of work.

See if F-Prot will decompress and remove the container, and then go from there. Make sure it's an early version of f-prot. It does look like an early PKLite, so you just might pull it off.

Do you have any prepped GRIDLOK.REG files lying around?

Unfortunately not :(

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