[stevekemp]

Very true, there are a lot of sites out there back in the day that a lot of oldtimers would remember.

My personal favourite was astalavista, named in relation to the legit search-site altavista I guess.

Actually I take that back, my favourite site was +fravia's reverse engineering pages. Mostly because the legitimate crack-sites were safe, but there was always a risk of downloading something with a virus, or a trojan instead. So it was more rewarding to read up on the reversing techniques and do the job myself.

Happy days using Numega's soft-ice (kernel mode debugger) to remove the protection it shipped with.

When I switched to Linux one of the first "problems" was that there were few commercial binaries which required a license key, so there were fewer reasons to actual get into reverse engineering / decompiling & patching linux binaries.

[strictnein]

Wow astalavista brings back some great memories. Hadn't thought about that site for a long, long time.

[dools]

> My personal favourite was astalavista, named in relation to the legit search-site altavista I guess.

That name contains two very iconic pop culture references from the 90s: altavista and the terminator

[stevekemp]

I noticed the terminator connection, but I wasn't too sure of the timescale - which came first.

Anyway it's a definitely a nice memory!

[selcuka]

> My personal favourite was astalavista, named in relation to the legit search-site altavista I guess.

The domain box.sk [1] hosted other interesting sites as well.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20000229151347/http://www.box.sk...

[jcpham2]

Also an astalavista.box.sk user (typo)

[girvo]

> astalavista

Phew that takes me back. And it's huge list of cracks and other things is what got me started looking into reverse engineering and security analysis haha

[egberts1]

Archive to Fravia’s website

Wow.

https://www.richardharrison.pro/fravia/

[qurashee]

Your post really brought back memories of softice and w32dasm. Incidentally one of the websites from that era (gamecopyworld) is still alive! Mind blown.

[Borg3]

Ahh SoftIce (and later WinIce for Win9x).. Great RING0 debugger.. I used it quite a bit for crack some games myself :) Oh look, it still here on disk: siw405w9x.exe Why I keep it... ;)

[xtracto]

Do you remember crackstore? That was my goto place to find software for cracking.