Hey guys, found this forum when trying to get softice to work and also beeing able to hide it... well i know those things now, and got around 100-150 different tutorials ranging from way back to the 286/386 time to more recent tutorials. Now my new problem is ... where should i start? (lol totaly newbie). have noticed after having a few tries on new games that they are silly packed with protection, so have tried to stay with small programs for starter. if anyone could give me some pointers i would really appreaciate it.

have you looked into crackmes.de (may be hall of fame or yet unsolved catagory )
there are some nice little gems out there (if there is a solution dont read them try the
crackme by yourself and when you succeed try comparing solutions)
hope i did not misunderstand you and have replied with a probable answer

no actually i have been working on some crackme's, but i used the tutorial throughout the whole prosedure. I found my first tutorial 4 days ago, and had never heard of assembly before then, so you can say any pointers at all would be great. Many of the tutorials i have tell me i should focus on learning asm, whilest others say dont bother. tried looking into asm, and it looks like wingdings the first few seconds ;p

You aren't really going to make much progress until you acquire some working knowledge of the meaning of the assembly language listings you will see in most debuggers. This is not a process you can start from the middle and work both ways. Do a search here for reference to "assembly language tutorial" (without the quotes) and you should find suggestions of some necessary reading. For example this thread:

http://www.woodmann.com/forum/showthread.php?t=177

referencing "The Art of Assembly." Keep in mind you are not trying to actually learn how to program in assembly, at least not at this point, only to understand what you are seeing in the disassembler actually means in terms of what's happening with your program. Unless you understant that, you aren't going to really make much progress. You might "follow" a tut by rote, but you won't really understand what's happening.

Regards,

Thank you that clarifies my question. going to go back to the assembly tuts i got and have a look in the bible at the faq.

thanks for the fast response