Very true, there are a lot of sites out there back in the day that a lot of oldtimers would remember.

My personal favourite was astalavista, named in relation to the legit search-site altavista I guess.

Actually I take that back, my favourite site was +fravia's reverse engineering pages. Mostly because the legitimate crack-sites were safe, but there was always a risk of downloading something with a virus, or a trojan instead. So it was more rewarding to read up on the reversing techniques and do the job myself.

Happy days using Numega's soft-ice (kernel mode debugger) to remove the protection it shipped with.

When I switched to Linux one of the first "problems" was that there were few commercial binaries which required a license key, so there were fewer reasons to actual get into reverse engineering / decompiling & patching linux binaries.