Join us at hack.lu 2026 — Info & Registration
Duration: 30 min
Type: Talk
Speakers: Inbar Raz
Abstract
I have cracked HUNDREDS of copy-protected games and other software in my youth, but all of it was on the IBM PC x86 platform. When a fellow retro-computing collector found a hardware-dongle copy-protected historic Hebrew software for the Apple IIe from 1983, I jumped on the opportunity even though I knew absolutely NOTHING about the computer, its architecture, or operating system. In this talk I’ll walk you through my learning process and figuring out things as I go, on my journey to find the copy protection and crack it.
Description
I’ll walk the audience through the steps of tackling the problem - understanding what I know (very little) and what I don’t know (a whole lot), looking for the tools, creating my own tools, figuring out the Apple IIe boot process and software loading, reversing old-style (no LLM!), finding the protection, bypassing it in the emulator, and later in the disk image. I’ll then talk about my efforts to recreate the dongle itself. I will demo on stage parts of the process.