very impressive write-up, sir!<p>i'm not super-proud of it, but i got started in programming by breaking the copy protection of dos games. i ran the game on my color monitor and borland's turbo debugger on the monochrome one, and single-stepped my way through the code until i had figured it out. then i'd use the norton utilities to find a particular code string in the executable on disk, and patch it with my NOP'ed out version. twenty years later and i still have the byte patterns of many 8086 machine language instructions memorized.<p>this would have just been harmless fun, except i posted my cracks on the BBSes of the day. well, i was young.