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One of the primary routes to hacking these early copy protections was to run a program that simulates the normal CPU operation.

The CPU simulator provides a number of extra features to the hacker, such as the ability to single-step through each processor instruction and to examine the CPU registers and modified memory spaces as the simulation runs.

The Apple II provided a built-in opcode disassembler, allowing raw memory to be decoded into CPU opcodes, and this would be utilized to examine what the copy-protection was about to do next.

Generally there was little to no defense available to the copy protection system, since all its secrets are made visible through the simulation.

But because the simulation itself must run on the original CPU, in addition to the software being hacked, the simulation would often run extremely slowly even at maximum speed.