I have been slowly trying to pick up cracking. I have been doing decent with w32dasm and a hex editor. But I haven't had much with anything besides patching.
Most of the tutorials I"ve seen use softice and have old software to crack which is almost impossible to find. Second a person told me cracking and XP don't go together. I had trouble following a lot of tutorials that use softice, I guess because some functions on 98 aren't on XP. So my question is do I really need to run 98? I mean do the majority of peole woh crack software run windows 98? I was considering installing a virtual machine of 98, becuase I don't want to give up my XP.

I do like using ollydbg, but I feel there aren't enough tutorials out there. I'll learn something or how to crack some target and when I try it on another target what I've learned didn't work. Maybe I'm a slow learner and like a thousand examples.

I run WindowsXP as os and don't even have Windows98 installed any more. Tool wise, I'm a pretty much IDA Pro / OllyDbg man myself, and find it makes a pretty good combination for the vast majority of reversing tasks. I don't have SoftIce installed as I've never needed it under XP (I had it installed under Win98, but never really found a real use for it where Ollydbg didn't handle the job as well).

thanks for the reply. I guess I'm just not finding enough tutorials for ollydbg, even though it seems more of the newer tutorials are for ollydbg. thanks again

i think ollydbg is a very good solution for debugger-newbies. anyway if you're interested in ollydbg, check out hxxp://biw.rult.at for some good introduction-stuff for ollydbg.
have a nice day!

And don't forget the "obvious."

Put "Ollydbg forum" and/or "Ollydbg + tut" in your favorite search engine. You'll be amazed what you can actually find on the net.

There's actually an Olly Forum where people can trade information and "ask questions."

Regards.

Don't forget that a debugger is simply a debugger. They mostly do the same kinda job. So a tut on using Softice to break an app can normally be converted to Ollydbg without too much trouble. The same the other way around.

You don't need Ollydbg specific tuts - grabs tuts for SoftIce etc and convert them yourself - it's the best way to get to grips with the debugger!

There is ofcourse the obvious problem of newbie tut-writers publishing the typical "then f5 till you hit the xxx then f12" trite. Then again, those tuts typically aren't worth spending much time on.
It's a lot more interesting to learn the basics of debugging, which are exactly the same in softice and olly, as Squidge pointed out.

So, do yourself a favor, debug notepad and/or a small asm program that doesn't really do much (preferably written by yourself) and get the hang of it. Having learned only the basics, you'll be able to do alot.

Fake

The problem was that most of the tutorials that were for softice I couldn't even run in XP. There wre commands that were for 98 that won't work in XP, but you can do it another way I've been told. I have softice, but older crackers tell me that I should crack with 98 if I want to run softice.
It's hard for me to follow a tutorial if when I get to a part and I cannot do it becuase of my OS.

I'll check out the tutorils listed on Ollydbg, thanks everybody

Driverstudio 2.7 with softice works nice on XP. Haven't had problems there.

As for the things that don't work under xp - I should think that to be mainly additional tools, like icedump and such. And altho they make for some easy cracking, they aren't essential.

Ofcourse, there are some differences when reversing on XP. Like the lack of hmemcpy, but then again, there's always another way.

Fake

>>The problem was that most of the tutorials..
So install W98se..& XP..&&&&&&&&&&&
basta!