Hi everyone,

firstly i'm a newbie member, and would like to say hi to everyone. This is a great forum, with loads of information. I have been playing around with stuff for a few months, and am slowly getting the hang of things. I'm never going to be a gun, but learning and having fun is what's it about!

Ok so I have fished some serials for a few keygenme's and bits and pieces, now I am trying a real program. I'ts a pretty basic program, I have run it under PEiD and it is VB 5.0/6.0.

Now I have hit a bit of a hurdle, when I open the program I am trying to crack in Olly, I am not able to run the program within Olly, thus unable to see the startup sequence like I can see with the crackme's I have been successful with.

I must admit, learning to use a debugger itself takes, me on a fairly steep learning curve, but thats half the fun

So my question is, should I be able to run the program from within Olly, and be able to see the start sequence?

many thanks!

Hello there,

If you are beginning, VB and Delphi oriented programs are generally not the way to learn cracking as they are not going to work the way you read in tutorials. Former is interpreted, the latter is a godawful mess. Of course, you can crack them provided you know which tools to use.

Best is to get an older version of Winzip (around 5-6) and MIRC (around 3-5) and crack/keygen those.

If you are hellbent on cracking the VB program only, though, I'd suggest running it in IDA Pro and using the IDA Pro debugger.

Olly to debug a VB program --- my very personal definition of hell.

Be ready to run in msvbvm50.dll and msvbvn60.dll a lot!

And enjoy. It'll come. Eventually.

Have Phun,

Hi Aimless,

many thanks for that, I will certainly try Winzip and MIRC.

I'm keen to keep going on my VB program, I felt I was making progress, I was able to jump the 'wrong serial' start up, but still get nag screens eventually.

So would IDA Pro be the best choice? I have read SoftIce is good too?

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction

Howdy,

Stick with IDA. You will need to run Softice in a win98 environment.
Unless you enjoy spending countless hours trying to make it
work with XP .

Woodmann

I'm hearing you about Softice, already had the bsod today

I was just getting comfortable with Olly...........but will try IDA. My head will be mush tonight!

You could also try debugging VB5/6 programs with SmartCheck,
SmartCheck is "archaic" but still good for serial fishing and understanding code flow of most native compiled VB5/6 targets. Sometimes it becomes very useful together with Olly to debug targets compiled to P-Code.

For you to really enjoy the power of SmartCheck, you'll first have to configure it properly.

I admit debugging VB and Delphi programs could be a nuisance and more time consuming than native C or Visual C programs. But with the help of DeDe for older Delphi Versions, and SmartCheck for VB5/6 working with Olly on such targets could become a bit easier, of cause depending on the type of protection the target program has on board..

Have Phun.

If you do use SmartCheck (which is a good idea), check out the tutorials on Eternal Bliss' site, which also cover general VB cracking.

http://www.woodmann.com/RCE-CD-SITES/E_bliss/cte.html

Near the bottom of the page you'll find an article on SmartCheck usage and settings (in the linked jpgs)

http://www.woodmann.com/RCE-CD-SITES/E_bliss/eb_vbpart2.htm


"archaic" maybe, but at least we have the corporate memory to recall this stuff


Oh, and Softice - it usually runs well in a VM with XP with minor tweaks, well covered in previous threads.

Oh God!

The memories.....!!!!

*sniffle*

Have Phun

Thanks everyone, really appreciate the help.

I have run my program within SmartCheck, and have found some interesting things, like the serial I type in, and what I think is how it is being compared to a valid serial.
So at the moment I am hoping to firstly fish out a valid serial to get me to the 'fully registered' window, and then work out the algo to self keygen it.

Oh, and I have configured SmartCheck according to Eernal Bliss's settings, many thanks to Kayaker and TempoMat.

Cheers guy's.

Alternatively...

VB Decompiler Pro, v8.3

Search. And Enjoy.

Have Phun