How to timelimit the runtime of an app?
BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Programming/How to timelimit the runtime of an app?
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| Hello all! I'd like to limit the runtime my maxgui app to 14 days. After that it should not start, even after reinstall. How do you do that? Hidden system entries? Date checking? What method is the "best" one? Grisu |
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| Going round to their House and taking it back, after examining all their disks/Media storage to make sure they havnt copyed it But seriously, The "Best" way, is everytime it starts, it connects to you, and asks permission to run. AlLa Steam |
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| Hidden registry keys with names like adfakjhfjahdsfjk. |
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| Unfortunately, you're probably going to get a lot of misleading answers to this question, because an awful lot of people think they can outsmart the crackers, and most of them don't have any idea how the crackers work, which means their convoluted plans seem effective to them. Cracking games used to be a hobby of mine ( for legal reasons I should point out that I only ever did it for the challenge, on games that I owned, and did not distribute the results and - at that time - no laws were broken. ) So I can assure you that cracking copy protection is spectacularly easy unless you have some seriously meaty protection. The best, without a bank loan, is probably to use Software Passport ( aka Armadillo with a fancy interface ) but even that isn't cheap. That would definitely have stopped an amateur like me. You hardly ever see cracked versions of Software Passport games, and when you do, it's always just a single key which has been leaked ( which immediately gets marked as stolen and stops working ) and not the copy protection itself which has been broken. It's non-invasive and shouldn't cause the end-user any problems at all. Just be careful not to use hardware locking, as tying your customer to a particular hard drive or something is very unpleasant and a lot of customers won't like that. I've had a lot of happy and surprised customers when they ask me if they can install their game on their work PC as well as their home one and are told they can and that they don't need any tricks or assistance to do it. |
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| Thanks for the help guys, especially Gabriel. |
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| [edit] this post removed cuz it was dumb |
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| Personally, I don't think the purpose of time-limited software is really to deter those that rise to the challenge of cracking. As Gabriel said, those that are determined WILL succeed. However, a vast majority of people just aren't that determined. For that matter, leaving behind some sort of reminder on uninstall (such as Grey's registry idea) would be effective at least 80% of the time. The best anti-piracy deterant is a good product at a price that aligns with it's quality. |
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