The Hasp dongle -- war stories?

[Joel Rees]

> On Tuesday, Jul 29, 2003, at 01:27 US/Pacific, Joel Rees wrote:
> >
> > The specific question I'm worried about right now is whether the Hasp
> > requires system extensions. I haven't seen any, but I haven't had a
> > chance to look inside the stacks very deeply. (XCFNs?)
> 
> Long ago my wife did a stack that used a dongle and yes, there were 
> XCMDs that communicated with the dongle. We came up with a pretty 
> complicated system for checking for the dongle code in the stack 
> (making sure the code had not been altered to bypass the dongle) and 
> then slowly destroying hypercard and the stack if the stack was messed 
> with in any way. Once she was ready to ship a version, there was a 
> fairly complicated set of steps that locked things down and if she did 
> something out of step, she'd have to re-install hypercard. It was fun 
> to work on.

So, I should assume that these dongles are using XCMDs, and that those
XCMDs will be necessary when porting to Revolution, and that porting to
MSWindows will require something similar to those XCMDs. What I've been
able to find on-line about Hasp dongles so far doesn't tell anything
about that. (I just haven't looked hard enough yet, I know.)

Thanks.

-- 
Joel Rees, programmer, Kansai Systems Group
Altech Corporation (Alpsgiken), Osaka, Japan
http://www.alpsgiken.co.jp