It’s becoming harder and harder these days to play your good old games that you’ve collected over the years. One reason beeing game discs simply dying of disc rot, others are modern operating systems that won’t support old games, especially their copy protections schemes.

To tackle the first, I recommend dumping your old discs and verify them via the excellent project redump, to address the second there are multiple ways:

• See if your game is available for a few bucks on GOG.com, they do a very good job in preverserving old games and making them playable on modern systems and prices are very fair.
• Use any other platform to digitally download your game.
• Try to set up a VM.
• Buy an old PC to run the games on.
• Find a No-CD-Crack.
• Write your very own Crack.

For most people dumping the disc to preserve the original copy and/or acquiring a downloadable version is probably the best solution. But, as you might have already guessed, I’m interested in the last option: Writing a crack myself ;)

Why?, you might ask. Well, there are many good reasons.
First, I’m interested in the techniques that we’re used to protect the games from being copied and how cracking groups bypassed these protections.
Second, there are many games out there that are so obscure that you will not find it on GOG and you will have a hard time to find a No-CD-Crack without downloading a virus to your PC.
Last but not least, I always become a bit of a Memberberry when I think back of the time when a new cracked game appeared on the net and was shared with your friends during a LAN party. Back then I was too young to fully understand what it takes to crack a game, but I always read the NFO that came with the game with joy end excitement, wondering if I would ever be capable to do what the ‘cool kids’ did.

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Please keep in mind that:

• I will only do a short writeup per game, explaining the basic concepts on how the protections works and how to crack it. I will not teach you the basic concepts of reverse engineering or coding in general.
• I will only have a look at games that are 20 years or older.
• I will not upload any gamefiles or disc images.
• I will not provide the cracked files.
• I only crack games of which I own the physical copy at the time of writing.

And always remember the ancient words: “Support the software developers, if you like the game, buy it” - ideally from a local flea market ;)