Quote:
Originally Posted by mudlord
Well, I remember when groups like Vitality, Reloaded and Hatred made a big deal about loaders, and preferring full unpacks/VM rebuilds back in the days...And that releases were nuked for being loaders/inlines.
I guess people don't care about standards anymore and that anything goes?
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As far as
I could see, the loaders and inlines had two main problems and
those were the main reasons that they were not preferred when
alternative solutions like unpacking/patching existed. The reasons being :
1. Loaders and inlines are not guaranteed to work on ALL the (even same platform like Windows') OSes as sometimes the APIs are different/not available and also some features like relocs/ASLR may be different/non-existent in some versions of the OSes.
One example I can think of, is that the OLD method of inlining Armadillo (older versions, not the newer version by the AKT tool) sometimes breaks on Windows 8 x64 when it works perfectly upto Win 7 !
2. Sometimes loaders requires privileges on the platform, that the USER running it may not be possessing (eg Administrator privileges). This is avoided by using actual patches/unpacked app...
But I see some advantages also with using loaders :
Far more control over your app especially when made CUSTOMIZED, rather than from a generic loader creator.
Also, especially when carefully customized, one loader made in the form of Search-and-Replace (SAR) can work for multiple versions of the same app very non-intrusively - therefore preferred for GAMES where there are MINOR but MANY builds/modifications very frequently but not feasible to create a working unpack EVERYTIME nor to create a SAR patcher !
Having said that , I am always for :
1. Keygenning - ie COMPLETE owning of the app
2. UNPACK and Patch
3. Loader
4. Inline patching
in the decreasing order of preference, based on the time take for and feasibility of going for each option !