[joezydeco]

I have a DOSbox story as well. A customer requested an emergency change to some firmware that was built for an old 8051-based platform. We had a single instance of the compiler from [redacted] available on a PC that was left in a closet for a decade or so.

The compiler maker was still in business but wanted 15 years of extortion-level "retroactive support" payments to let us move the license to a newer machine, and I could hear the old one about to fail. Thankfully the protection scheme was the old type that locked the compiler to the MAC address of the host PC.

We copied the compiler over to a DOSbox instance and spoofed the MAC. Worked like a charm.

[snvzz]

Good for an emergency, but I'd make sure to calmly move to an open 8051 compiler.

Because screw that awful vendor.

[Rinzler89]

Why? Moving your project to another compiler for a one time change is creating needless work and potentially opening a new can of worms you don't want to deal with.

If you have something battle tested and you know it works then just stick with it especially that now you got the vendor out of the loop.

[joezydeco]

Porting was the backup plan but time was of the essence, so the hack worked. Validation of brand new object code would have been a huge pain. But yeah, I would Assume that Renewing the license would have killed the project.