Hi folks, Long story... but I'm back. No response on the newbies forum & I suspect this prog may be of interest. I 'cracked' its earlier (1.0) version but it uncracked itself after a couple of months. Even though I'd stepped the clock forward 2 months, I missed whatever it did.
I guess the v2.00 will have similar stuff in it & the way it generates the unique system code is interesting. Its very easy to (apparently) crack using smartcheck but I suspect after time it'll revert to its eval way.
The prog itself isn't much use unless you're into research in a big way but its worth a look:
Text Analyst v.2.0 (2mb)The d/l address is:
http://w*w.megaputer.com/down/tm/ta/ta2eva.exe
but if this fails, you'll need to complete the registration form with rubbish & d/l via http://w*w.megaputer.com.
(ps the easy bit in smartcheck uses strcmpi) but i couldn't get my head round it in sice.
I'd be interested if anyone can explain how it deals with the win reg code in order to generate the unique machine serial & also if anyone can tell me how the prog seems still regged when you move the clock forward but eventually reverts to being an eval version. I just can't see it.
Scally

Hi Scally,

Your description sounded interesting so I downloaded the proggy to have a look. Unfortunately, I seem to be having a problem disassembling it in Wdasm. Everytime I try to load up ta.exe for disassembly, Wdasm hangs / won't start disassembling at all. Did you have any problems with this ??? Any ideas ???

Regards,
Clandestiny

Welcome back Scally

The reason for the W32Dasm problems Clandestiny is that this is packed with PECompact. I tried Yoda's UnPECompact on it but it just kept giving me an "error allocating memory" problem and wouldn't unpack. I even got a Windows error message when I tried to run TextAnalyst with Softice loader.

You might want to try UnPECompact on your system, it might work better.

Regards,
Kayaker

Hi all, it really is good to be back. Ignore any posts from waggscally*hotmail.com. Someone hacked my old A/c.
Kayaker: How d'ye know it was pe compact? I tried 'gettype' & it said it was clean.
I've tried tno's & yoda's & both fail. Procdump fails on pecompact but has a go at it with unknown but the resulting exe produces a page fault, so its probably not right.(?)
Regards
Scally

Besides the 2 sections labelled pec1 and pec2? FileInfo told me

K.

Hi reversers
I have unpacked it.
If you are interested, i can send it.

Regards
SV

Hi SV,
Well done! Love to see it. What did you use? I've tried several unpackers with no luck.
If you did it manually, is there any chance of explaining - I've tried to follow a tut. on manual unpacking before but got lost in the code.
Scally