Bringing a decade old vector editor back to life
This is part of a larger pattern of fairly weak attempts to confuse a reverse engineer that made it frustrating to figure out what all the opcodes did, and there were many duplicate opcodes that were just implemented in different ways.Since the code presented in the article didn't look like handwritten Asm (and if it was, it would've probably been even more insanely obfuscated and greatly confused IDA's decompilation), I wonder if compilers of the time were far worse at optimisation, or if the author deliberately disabled it so that the code would be more bloated and harder to understand as well as containing the source obfuscations; seems like "Here's addition implemented by multiplying the result with some number and its reciprocal" would be something that's replaced-on-sight by an optimiser doing constant propagation.Also, I was not surprised to discover that this program appears to be both [1] of German origin, and [2] shareware. When I was in the cracking scene long ago, "German shareware" was widely known for the insane strength of its protection.