Spelunking (or... Using Hackman)
Written by Sparkle and Zortran ⌐ 2000. TechnoLogismiki offers no support for the documentation presented in this book. Use it on your own risk.
There has been a lot of discussion about "How can I crack a progam?" or "How on earth does this program do this?". In order to answer these questions, we have to dig deeper in Windows.
Let us clear something: this book will not let you crack a program. After all, Hackman is not intended to by a generic cracker. It's only a help tool. It offers you all the functionality you may need in order to discover secrets, but it will do nothing unless you instruct it to. For cracking you must use Sparkle's Cracking Tutorial II. Release date of this tutorial has been delayed on purpose, in order to make it more comprehensive.
Hackman, although one application, can be separated into three different global modules:
Editor: allows you to perform a word processor's actions on a binary file. In other words, you can treat any executable or dynamic library or any other binary file as a plain text.
Disassembler: translate any binary file into comprehensive assembly language.
Debugger: the youngest brother, is growing older as time passes by. Here's all the fun, you can see how the program works.
The purpose of this book is to let you slide smoothly deeper in the way Windows think and act. You'll gain the knowledge to obtain the information you need no matter how tough programmers try to hide it.