The Art of Dissolving Splash Screens

[Scott Kane]

From: "Tiemo Hollmann TB" <toolbook at kestner.de>

Hi Tiemo,

> I am just looking for a licensing system. Never heard about partial key 
> verification. Which system and supplier are you using?

None.  PKV isn't something I can explain in a nutshell and certainly not 
something I want to explain in an email list that is indexed by search 
engines.  It's tricky and experience has shown drives wanna be crackers mad, 
which is a satisfying feeling <g>.

In the past I would have recommended several protection schemes in a heart 
beat but they pretty much all have been compromised, so, some time back 
(along with several associates) I started doing this.  I did not invent it 
by any stretch.  Previously I used Armadillo and ASProtect.  ASProtect is 
widely cracked now and the author hasn't updated in 18 months.  Armadillo is 
also compromised at many levels and since Chad sold it to Digital River it's 
gone really bad (Chad was a genious and he was always one step ahead).  Most 
things Digital River get their hands on suffer like this.  In any case none 
of these tools work with Revolution Windows executables due to how a 
Revolution executable is constructed (it's intepreted by the engine at 
runtime and using these tools damages the format) so they wouldn't help you 
at all.  At a later date I may be doing something for the Rev community 
regarding PKV either as an article (which RR need to work with me on so it's 
not public which would defeat the purpose) or as a library which I'm looking 
at working up so that it could be used seperately and included into any 
application.  The thing is a Rev solution would work cross platform which 
none of the commercial tools can do.  By combining PKV with Rev's excellent 
encryption technology you can get a reasonably secure system and the nature 
of how PKV works means the application becomes a moving target for crackers, 
so as fast as they crack the exe changes and the keygen (or even a released 
authentic key) is rendered useless.  Sorry I can't give more detail at this 
time.

Scott Kane
Moderator comp.software.shareware.*