A developer successfully bypassed the copy protection on a piece of legacy software, a feat achieved by reverse engineering a 40-year-old hardware dongle. This device was preventing access to software used by an accounting firm. The software, written in RPG, ran on a Windows 98 machine and required the dongle plugged into the parallel port to function.

After examining the software and its associated compiler, the developer used tools like Reko to disassemble the executable. The copy protection routine communicated with the dongle via the parallel port. By analyzing the code, the developer determined the routine's logic and the expected output value, which was a constant.

The developer then wrote a script to brute-force the correct value, allowing the software to run without the dongle. This involved patching the executable with the correct value and testing it. This process highlights how reverse engineering can overcome even the most outdated security measures.

This project underscores the ongoing challenge of preserving and accessing legacy software. It also showcases the power of reverse engineering and the importance of understanding hardware and software from different eras. The next step could be extracting the data from the legacy system for use in modern accounting tools.