Fortunately it wasn't a SaaS that shut down.
I would first search keygen/crack archives to see if some famous scene group had already done the needful long ago, although for software as obscure as this, it's less likely. Then again, I've seen some very obscure software ("there's an app for that!?") when browsing those before.
You can go to this effort to get it to make the right magic number .... or just find the place where it gets tested and replace the conditional branch with a unconditional branch (or a no-op)
Having said that I once wrote 68k code that was an executable copyright message, and other code that if it discovered it wasn't running on an authorised machine logged to a known port, sent an email, unlinked the binary, queued "sudo reboot", killed the parent process and then exited (all the authorised machines were mine, running a bespoke kernel)
The problem with that software title is caused by a hostile licensing system it uses. It relies on an offline form of online activation where the activation key is tied to your installation ID, which in turn depends on OS/hardware identifier of your computer. This is an overkill IMO.
I cannot imagine people working with ceramic tiles cracking a static licensing system. Yes, they can overshare license keys but realistically this does not happen too often, and there are non-invasive ways to circumvent this.
Kinda off topic but related. But is it realistic these days to just expect software to write once and run forever?
I am a TypeScript/Frontend guy by trade, but I always admire languages like Go. It seems like a simple language that I can write once and maintain forever or once in a blue moon. Everytime I want to write something in TypeScript and then I pull bunch of crazy dependencies, I began to question if it is worth it? These days I am just pulling React, TypeScript, and just do CSS. If I need a dependency I'll try to just code it from scratch with LLM. Is it realistic to expect, React, TypeScript to be maintenance free forever? Since those are basically just abstraction on top of HTML/JS/CSS which are rock solid.
Ideally the home-baked software that I build will be just using very simple technologies, and I can just vibe/LLM code all the dependencies, or worst case just vendor it, and update it once a year or longer.
>I use a MacBook, and this application is Windows only, so executing it is out of the question.
This is where things went off the rails. Choosing hard paths should be done when you're exploring, and never when you're fixing a business issue. Why didn't they just try it out in a VM or even a mega cheap VPS? Why is doing it the easiest way imaginable completely out of the question?? I have no empathy for this kind of pain.
I'm not sure if it's abandon ware but I found a gist which attempted to get pictures from this Korean Kindergarten app for backup which we also use.
I tried it and it only half worked and you had to copy a cookie out of the browser which would expire after a couple of days.
I took it and extended it added a login with selenium or what it is called and now I can run it daily and get those pictures out and into my immich. Instance.
The script was already a couple of years old and outside of Korea nobody uses KidsNote, I made it used ware again: https://git.jeena.net/jeena/kidsnote-backup
I have a tangentially-related question. I've been using Novagraph Chartist since the Windows 3.1 days back when I was 17 (I'm now climbing 50!). It seems that the original company behind this has vanished, I've asked for support, but no joy there, I hope the author is still alive. I'm on Chartist 5.2. It needed online activation towards the end of its life.
Whilst in these modern days of hi-DPI screens and anti-aliased lines, I still love using Chartist - I know all of the keyboard shortcuts and I can use it to create a diagram faster than using anything else.
Does someone have a patch for it or something?
Thanks, Nick.
That's real abandonware. These days people gripe and moan about "abandonware" when they have the source code.
Oh shit, no new commit in 8 months! Abandonware!
reminds me of my own software I created and was selling online 20 years ago. I lost the source code but people still wanted to buy it. So I sold it for few years (shareware). I had a serial key generator for windows but it was annoying to do this manually.. I wanted to extract the key generation algo so it can be generated automatically after payment. I also tried many disassembly tools like ghidra, but without luck. I decided to stop selling / supporting the software. Nowadays, I still get the occasional mail from people asking where they can buy it, or of there are some updates.
They told us that with AI you can vibe-code anything now...
So, no need to make old program to work. Just write new one.
/sarcasm
For what it's worth, will probably run via WINE for long after Window's support fades... even though Windows itself is pretty legendary in terms of backwards compatibility.
It might not be that hard to make your own version of this, maybe average HSL values for each square or something. How are the available tile colors stored?
Might be illegal to break someone else's proprietary software, no matter how abandoned it is.
Try to ask them for source code, with the intention to open-source it. Then you (and maybe others!) can break it whole day long.
The horrors of non-free software...
When I become king of the United Continents, I will make a new rule: If you don't publish high-quality updates for your software for one year, it will become open source automatically.