Best way to add a large block of data into a file to patch it?

[Chuck954]

Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I did check out segment flags and tested different ones but it kept having the same problem.

Ideally, I would have used a custom DLL file but I am not familiar enough with writing DLLs yet. It was easiest to simply code a manual patch as the majority of my time has been spent learning low level debugging/assembly skills.

I ended up re-writing the patch after further study of how it gets written into memory. I used the original function that decrypts the license and wrote assembly code to get the address of the new segment with the license, then I just moved the modified license into the correct memory spot. Before I was simply changing the stack pointer to point to the new segment I made and let the original function copy the data itself into memory. Using an assembly to hex converter I just pasted the bytes in and good to go.

I still have more work to do in cleaning it up and making it work for other versions of this software. The good news is that it works now and I am able to start the program up normally with all features unlocked and it didn't crash once yesterday.

[sope]

What i used to do with hasp4 encryption & decryption was i used to create several numbered decrypted file & then used to hook up an routines, next load decrypted files with exact number of bytes to load at that particular memory location. Was an tedious process.

In short you need to write code to hook up the process & load your patched data & write it on memory address to patch.

Cheers Sope