how softICE gui works?

NTDEV
21

There is no arguing that SoftICE was a superior product to both wdeb386 and windbg.

Really? Well, I’m here to argue. It’s what I do best :slight_smile:

Ignoring the fact that we’re all necroposting (a plague that’ll be fixed on the new site, hallelujah)… I personally never found SoftIce to be anything but a collection of highly version-specific reverse engineered hacks and hooks (though some of them rather clever). Chasing updates to match a given system version was super annoying. Far from “beautiful”, I found the UI to be to be obscure and out of date even for the time.

I always had a license, always hated every aspect of it, and was deeply thankful for WinDbg even from its earliest versions. I just could never “take” to SoftIce, and was even more annoyed by Numega’s greedy licensing practices for the last few versions.

Having said that, there were people who loved it, and could make it sing. I’ll never forget Russinovich expertly piloting SoftIce though some obscure Windows disassembly, and popping out of his office every five minutes or so to share his latest discovery.

22

In the spirit of bot necroposts, I asked copilot to chime in:

When comparing Sofice and WinDbg, it’s essential to understand their purposes and strengths:

  1. Sofice:
    • I apologize, but I couldn’t find specific information about a tool named “Sofice.” It’s possible that the name is misspelled or refers to a less common or specialized tool.
    • If you have additional context or details about Sofice, please provide them, and I’ll try to offer a more accurate comparison.

That pretty much sums it up. On the other hand I live across the street from one of the mansions built with Numega money,

23

Expanding on Mr. @Mark_Roddy’s most excellent bot necro-posting concept, but correcting for the spello, I got:

1125×795 103 KB

And, for the record, that $700 price tag was from 2006… which is the equivalent of over $1K today.

Super good insight there from CoPilot, huh? No? Yeah…

24

Well, the heyday of SoftICE was surely the mid-1990s, at a time where Microsoft charged nearly $1,000 for the DDK. Microsoft paid a great deal of attention to WinDbg at the turn of the century, and it became the tool of choice.