Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[BU508A]

Nothing sophisticated at all, but what this chip is Did not search for it though.

https://www.jotrin.com/product/parts/CAT702_103090_00203

But one needs a login for downloading the datasheet.

I have a login there, there is no data-sheet, it's a trap 

Thanks for the warning.
utsource is a reputable source (I've ordered once from them) and they have them in stock, but no datasheet available:
https://www.utsource.net/itm/p/1526395.html

[DC1MC]

Nothing sophisticated at all, but what this chip is Did not search for it though.

https://www.jotrin.com/product/parts/CAT702_103090_00203

But one needs a login for downloading the datasheet.

I have a login there, there is no data-sheet, it's a trap 

Thanks for the warning.
utsource is a reputable source (I've ordered once from them) and they have them in stock, but no datasheet available:
https://www.utsource.net/itm/p/1526395.html

Nobody ever will be able to program it, but we have a tough guy that can crack it with debug.exe  .
I did it ca. 26 yrs ago with more advanced tools, and it took weeks, those guys used state of the art anti-cracking measures at the  time and the code was done with the latest and greatest Watcom C 386 in protected mode, Turbo Debugger 386 was not even capable of understanding it.

That was on Fravia's time and I was a bit more anarchistic 

[HenryFeng]

Normally it should be easy to open and check the contents. It is not like a RSA SecurID that is rendered inoperable after opening, it wasn't that advanced back in the 90s.

Had to sit out a thunder storm that was not forecasted but came anyway, and then all things get unplugged.

Indeed the dongle is only held together by friction of four pins. With a thin blade it was easy to pry open

Nothing sophisticated at all, but what this chip is Did not search for it though.

I think you are getting close, it's most likely just a PAL or GAL device implemented some simple logic gates. probably doesn't event have any flip-flops.

[PA0PBZ]

Nobody ever will be able to program it, but we have a tough guy that can crack it with debug.exe  .

That's not fair, I clarified in the other thread what I was referring to. But I'm still sure it can be cracked 

[Vince]

Edit: Some feel this is off topic here, so I created a thread in the vintage computing section. We can continue it there if wanted or needed: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/vintage-computing/orcad-for-msdos/new/#new

Are you kidding ? You got complaints via MP ?

Wow if THIS is OT.... then boy, to the jury out there in the sky, I sincerely apologize for the 3000 posts I made here in the past 18 months !

I now realize it was all OT BS spam that had no business being posted here.

I apologize to all the silent members who have had to endure my posts for all that time. I truly am sorry.

I was about to post about my Rochar Nixie DVM restoration but I won't because hell I wouldn't want to offend anyone. Maybe someone will complain because it's old junk, or because it's French so unknown to them and being French it's junk factorial !3 to begin with, it's no USA made HP or Tektronix.. Or maybe if I write more than two lines about it someone will complain that I write too much, because their twitter / facebook brain can't process more than a handful of signs.

I would hate to offend anyone so I guess the only sure way to avoid that from happening, is simply to refrain from posting about anything altogether.

Again I am sorry for my passage on TEA and all the suffering that caused to god knows how many people, I am scared now when I try to picture the extent of the damage I did to the TEA "brand".

I hope my disappearance will allow those people to heal eventually, and post extremely interesting and perfectly on topic stuff of their own. I can't wait to see it all and click on the report button if it doesn't pass my own criteria.

Good riddance they say... yes, I agree.

Was fun while it lasted, but everything comes to an end eventually I guess....

Thanks however to the few people who were nice to me and even sent me stuff, I love you all my dear TEA buddies ! 
I just wish I could have stayed long enough to some day send YOU stuff as well, giving back not just taking ! 
Well you can still stay in touch via MP or e-mail...

 

[DC1MC]

This is kind of my last message regarding this in the TEA thread, I don't want to provoke a moderator intervention  , but only to dispel the misconception regarding the dongle, the Orcad366 at the time was considered strategic material, with export prohibition, under the mostly forgotten Cocom laws.

So the dongle was state of the art military grade shite, and the data inside was accessed via some pseudo-clock done on interrupts with sequences of commands and some kind encryption algorithm implementation. In the end we didn't fully crack the dongle protocol itself, but got lucky and found the addresses of "real" functions and what were the correct parameters. The dongle itself was only very short accessible to us, brought by someone over the night from some now long defunct company. Ah to be young at the beginning of '90ies  with hopes and dreams, quickly shattered by real capitalism  .

We've never distributed the fully cracked version, to the posers that pretended that they've fully cracked it we were asking about this or that menu and be met with silence and respect  .

[DC1MC]

@Vince - man are you really serious, wtf is happening here, I mean compared with the usual medical reports, "those stinky hobo hams" and the other stuff, your stuff was nice and refreshing in a beginners way, including the fridge timer and components sorting.

Please reconsider, don't let idiots win  !!!

[capt bullshot]

When I worked at STEIM in Amsterdam, there was a guy who looked into it and he made a cracked version of the software, but don't know how he did it. Might be that I still have it on a hard disk somewhere

Wow so it can be done ! Yeah do keep in touch, crossing fingers you can find that cracked version somewhere ! 

You guys remind me of some of my "sins" - I've cracked at least two "copy protected" softwares for Apple //e computers back in the days. Compared to todays "copy protection measures" and me being young and dedicated, it was just a piece of cake to crack these disks (5.25" floppies with some "modified" sectors). Could be easily defeated by finding the checks and special sector reading routines using the built-in disassembler, patching a few bytes and then copying the required date to "normal" sectors, iirc). Life was easy and successful back in the days 

Edit: I also remember I had put some effort in de-dongling some MSDOS and/or early Windows SW using some creative methods to discover the accesses to the dongle while using some "debug.exe" alike. Anyway, since I neither remember what software that was, nor if I was successful in the end, one can easily conclude that it hasn't been that important to me. At least not as important as impressing the others in school when I did the Apple //e cracks

BTW: DC1MC, nice to see you here again, and don't fear the moderation, I think they have got the message. If not, we should disappear from here.

[Neper]

Again I am sorry for my passage on TEA and all the suffering that caused to god knows how many people, I am scared now when I try to picture the extent of the damage I did to the TEA "brand".

Bon sang, Vince, don't be such a drama queen...

Have a good night's sleep and tomorrow your little world will be fine again. 

[DC1MC]

Edit: I also remember I had put some effort in de-dongling some MSDOS and/or early Windows SW using some creative methods to discover the accesses to the dongle while using some "debug.exe" alike. Anyway, since I neither remember what software that was, nor if I was successful in the end, one can easily conclude that it hasn't been that important to me. At least not as important as impressing the others in school when I did the Apple //e cracks

BTW: DC1MC, nice to see you here again, and don't fear the moderation, I think they have got the message. If not, we should disappear from here.

Hi capt b, I've never left, just become older and less motivated  ^ under this terrible heat, maybe we should meat again to do unspeakable things to my HP spectrum analyzer that collects tons of dust, I think I even have  one of these external memories with goodies, and produce a lot of cool pictures an stories here and on Wunderkiste 

Cheers,
DC1MC
 

[capt bullshot]

Oh, regarding my previous post, while having a pee some details of the mentioned "creative methods" came back to my mind:

It's been an old ISA bus PC/AT or PC/386 machine, and the accesses to the dongle (through the printer port at its typical I/O addresses 0x378 or whatever) kind of interfered with the ISA bus sound card. So each time the SW accessed to dongle, one could hear some clicking in the speakers connected to that archaic sound card. It was quite helpful to recognize functions that accessed the dongle while doing some "step over" equivalents in the debugger 

[capt bullshot]

Hi capt b, I've never left, just become older and less motivated  ^ under this terrible heat, maybe we should meat again to do unspeakable things to my HP spectrum analyzer that collects tons of dust, I think I even have  one of these external memories with goodies, and produce a lot of cool pictures an stories here and on Wunderkiste 
 

Yeah, spent the last two weeks avoiding the heat. It's a bit late now and I should get some sleep - otherwise and in general fully agree. Need to get off my arse for that, that's a hard process but let's go for it.

[DC1MC]

Also remembered about the Aladdin dongles, while being a solid hw concept, they've screwed the software implementation and every poser and "group" was releasing cracks on "e-donkey", a proto-torrent, does everyone remember it ?

[capt bullshot]

Nothing sophisticated at all, but what this chip is Did not search for it though.

https://www.jotrin.com/product/parts/CAT702_103090_00203

But one needs a login for downloading the datasheet.

There were some dedicated "dongle chips" back then. For sure, documentation would have been under NDA. The sophistication level of these chips increased steadily over time ...

[capt bullshot]

To at least stay a bit on topic, I feel the urgent need to rant about wireless connected TE:

This is a data log from a wireless piece of TE (a precision environmental sensor) that does ambient temperature, relative humidity and air pressure at a surprisingly good accuracy. Vulgo an old TI SensorTag with Bluetooth LE.
It's placed about 1.5m from the receiver unit away within the same room, and still loses data (see the "blank" space at the right hand side of the plot). It's using a very simpe scheme, just broadcasting the sensor values through the BLE beacons, and the receiver side just receiving these beacons, extracting the data and sending them to the logger. No fancy handshaking or whatever, just "broadcast" style. And it's not working reliably at very short distance. Crap that is.

[Zoli]

Normally it should be easy to open and check the contents. It is not like a RSA SecurID that is rendered inoperable after opening, it wasn't that advanced back in the 90s.

Had to sit out a thunder storm that was not forecasted but came anyway, and then all things get unplugged.

Indeed the dongle is only held together by friction of four pins. With a thin blade it was easy to pry open

Nothing sophisticated at all, but what this chip is Did not search for it though.

Speaking about the devil 

[Black Phoenix]

So we have a crack?

[Zoli]

So we have a crack?

No; but the the shown documentation make very easy to make one, since is a deep analysis of the Rainbow Pro Sentinel dongle software side.

[bsfeechannel]

So we have a crack?

Multiple cracks, actually.

[Black Phoenix]

Eish, that's bad. But expected with how old the part looks to be.

[capt bullshot]

Pretty interesting, what "crack" is supposed to mean in different languages (apart from the technical term)

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=crack

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack

at de.wikipedia especially the last one: A person that has excellent skills in one ore more particular fields, but not in the meaning of the urbandictionary record.

[pcprogrammer]

As long as we are not smoking it

[RolandK]

I recently passed by a older very precise digital clock with double warm cathode tubes  .

Now the questions:

1. Where is it? (i only know this point, as i passed by, and no, it is not in Germanys) 
2. Since when is it running? 

Extra points:
3. How was it controlled in the beginning and how is it controlled today? 

[McBryce]

I recently passed by a older very precise digital clock with double warm cathode tubes  .

Now the questions:

1. Where is it? (i only know this point, as i passed by, and no, it is not in Germanys) 
2. Since when is it running? 

Extra points:
3. How was it controlled in the beginning and how is it controlled today? 

DCF77? That's been around since 1973.

McBryce.

[Specmaster]

@Vince - man are you really serious, wtf is happening here, I mean compared with the usual medical reports, "those stinky hobo hams" and the other stuff, your stuff was nice and refreshing in a beginners way, including the fridge timer and components sorting.

Please reconsider, don't let idiots win  !!!

The $64,000 question is..., who might the idiots be then