Journal slothman32's Journal: electronics inside a dongle 1
We have all heard of dongels.
I was thinking of a new kind.
It has ROM, in circuit form, that allows the game to play.
It allows DRM in that you can't run it without the dongle and since it has electroncs, instead of code, it is faster.
It's sort of like a DLL on a stick.
I don't know how much you could fit on a normal USB stick but it still might work.
This was a principal element (Score:2)
of "hardware based copy protection". FlexLM used one, on the parallel port. Ther later went to a networked license key server. There were others. This is how SoftImage used to be protected, as well as several expensive add-ons to AutoCAD, in the '90's.
Apple had a word processor that was protected with one that went on the serial port (round). I cracked that with a friend. There was a loading routine that checked for the presence of the coded dongle, and returned a boolean if were there. We used a hex