My father, an accountant, used to have a program like that, that used RPG and a dongle! Good times. Horrible donle.

> I must say, this copy protection mechanism seems a bit… simplistic? A hardware dongle that just passes back a constant number?

Seems like it was an appropriate amount of engineering. Looks like this took between an afternoon and a week with the help of an emulator and decompiler. Imagine trying to do this back then without those tools.

Many a crack back in the day was even more simple still, we'd just find and alter the right JE or JNE into a JMP and we're off to the races. As the author found, the tough part is just finding and interpreting where and how the protection was implemented. If throwing the exe in a hex editor gave you access to String Data References (not always the case, but more common than not) then you'd just fail the check you were trying to skip, find that string, hop over into assembly to see what triggered loading that, and then just alter the logic to jump over it when the time comes.

Why wasn't (isn't) this more widely used? It was clearly more effective than a cdkey.

I know there is cost associated with the hardware, but surely the costumer can cough 15 more dollars.

The only reason I can think of is wanting as wide adoption before max revenue as possible. But then, this has never been too popular, not even for games!