[csl]

I did basically everything you mention, back in the day, although on a C64.

In many ways, things were much easier back then: Direct access to most of the hardware, flat memory layout, smaller and vastly simpler ISAs, smaller programs (meaning shorter disassemblies to wade through), no protected mode so you could overwrite anything in RAM and so on. And you wouldn't even have to do it live in-memory, just disassemble the program piecewise from disk. People did extraordinary things back then, and you vastly underestimate their capabilities. Sure, you had to write a lot of tooling yourself, but it was simpler times.

I am not trying to detract from the copy protection mechanism, which truly is ingenious. I was just genuinely curious whether I was misunderstanding anything from the article.