Ok, I read in some posting here that making your game shareware is not always usefull. Or for that matter easy to do and secure. I have given this some thought and I figured I would post how I did it for a friends program (a simple one, it was for "sh*ts and giggles") and get some feedback.

I know that if someone wants to get into your game, they will. I did this example just for fun and had a few friends try to "crack" it with no luck.

How it worked:
I had the person give me thier name and my program read thier HD number (it did some basic calculations to it involving the date to make it look "random")
I got it, ran the same calculation only using thier name instead of the date to get the code I return to them.
When they ran the program, it decoded the string based on thier name and compared the answer to the actual HD number. if they matche, it worked and vice versa.

I know that it is a simple and somewhat dull way to do shareware, but it worked at my college. Reformated HD have the same number and not many people swap out thier HDs.

Let me know what our thoughts are. But, please be gentle
Later