What about St*rforce ?

[dyn!o]

"I'm neither so kind... nor trying to increment my post counter."
I was joking . I tried to say that it's always nice to meet kind people. No matter where.

"So, apparently, S.F. reminds me an old protection scheme from the apple II scene called MCODE"
Ehh... good old times. I remember C64 games where tight CPU architecture allowed to build sometimes amazing protections (e.g. calculating the jump offset from clock cycles).

"The goal was creating an unknown language to turn the protection routine into a sort of maze inpossible to trace by crackers. A kind of virtual machine in fact, where executed code is unreadable."
That's a very good description of the most powerful protection.

"can code my own tools, but for me it's just a hobby, I've also got a social life,"
We are not different (other members). We all are similar .

"I'm of course *not* a cracking god,"
There is no such one.

"Even if the goal is too far away for me to reach, I'm still being curious about it."
That's the point.

Good luck.