Hi all

I need a little help with cracking PaintShop Pro ver 7 (trial). I am a newbie but have cracked quite a few progs with s/n protection. PaintShop pro is very different for me as it uses a completely different protection - it's a 30 day trial, with no s/n to enter.

This is probably an easy protection to crack, but not having attempted any kind of time limit protections, it's giving me a little trouble!
I've been setting a bpx on GetSystemTime, hoping that maybe the prog checks the date just after the call. GetSystemTime appears to be called from a file called "MCF.RTL" or something similar. When I hit F12 and return to the main prog I can find no sign of any data related to today's date anywhere.

Am I going in the right direction here? will I find the protection code by using such a breakpoint or should I be breaking on something else?

Can someone (especially someone who has already cracked the prog) please point me in the right direction. I'm not looking for an answer outlining the exact place (offset) where I should patch the prog, as I want to discover that myself. However I do need some kind of guidence because I'm just thrashing around in the dark at the moment!

Any help will be greatly appreciated

Thanks in advance
xOptiMus

Hi xOptiMus,

I've not cracked PaintShop Pro myself, but I was wondering if you've tried an api moniter to moniter all time related calls...there are several...GetLocalTime, GetFileTime, GetSystemTime...ect...I've been learning the usefulness of an api moniter myself recently and it might be worth a try since it will tell you in what order the apis are called, their addresses, and the parameters being pushed on the stack.

Good Luck,
Clandestiny

Do you get a MessageBox saying that the demo
period has expired ? If yes, set a bpx MessageBoxA and with some luck you land right where the routine is called. Now look a bit upstream in the code if there is some conditional jump instruction which might jump over MessageBox call. (Of course there are several possibilities why this might not work :-()

Good luck

i'd suggest http://www.cracking4newbies.org as i figure BlackB has written a tutorial on PSP 6.0x ... maybe it gives you some help.. it covers both taking out the nag and removing 30 day trial

-C_DKnight

See my message in the other forum (previously +fravia's).
Regards,

Forget my previous post. I remembered it wrong somehow. It’s been a few weeks since I cracked it.
I just cracked it once more today, and here is a couple of hints for you.
Enter Paintshop in the Sice loader. When you’re at the beginning of the code, you may try a bpx postquitmessage. ( To get the full potential of this approach, your copy of Paintshop must be expired). When Sice breaks, just hit F12 until you reach psp.exe code for the second time. You should by then be right after a call to Updatewindow. You are now in the middle of a call that runs/builds/loads the nag screen. If you just get out of the call, and then re-enter the call, I’m sure you will see a way to get rid of the nag screen. Now, if you do this correctly, you will also get rid of the time limitation at the same time.
If you only want to get rid of the time limitation, but keep the nag, just run the program until the expired nag shows. Enter a bpx destroywindow in Sice and then hit the quit button. When Sice breaks, get rid of the breakpoint, and start tracing backwards. Quite soon you will get to a point in the code where you will see some jle-instructions. This is where you can manipulate the program to never expire.
Hope this helps…
Regards,
Hobgoblin