Paul Urbanus wrote
If you can reverse engineer your hardware key (and you are a legitimate
>owner of the software), then maybe you could write a kernel level driver
>that would emulate the parallel port. I'm a hardware guy and I don't
>know diddly about writing kernel level drivers - so this last suggestion
>may not be realistic. I have done some looking at dongle communication,
>and they much more sophisticated than the old Xilinx days of the 'AA',
>'AB', and 'AC' hardware keys, which were easy to duplicate (only
>requiring some CMOS counters and gates).
That reminds me...
In the 1990s I paid some 5 digits for Xilinx software, for some specific consultancy projects I used to do then. One of the dongles (two of them) failed but they would not replace it. So I found some Russian who cracked it. I ended up with cracked Viewlogic 4 (Xilinx version) and XACT 6.something. All undongled! Last time I used it was
1996 but it would still run today. The only problem was Viewlogic which required an 8514-emulating video card to do 1024x768; I still have the mach32 video card which did that...
This kind of issue is why I still use Protel PCB 2.8 - I have the dongle but I picked up a patch in 1995. Runs on my latest PC fine.
I also have a box full of Autocad dongles from the 1980s...
Generally, one can patch the program to avoid the dongle check and this is the easiest way.