The crack was the story. Everything else was just noise.
The problem was the "time bomb." OrCAD v16.0 had a nasty feature: if the system clock drifted or the license wasn't rechecked every 24 hours, the software would scramble your netlist—the very instructions that tell a circuit board how to think. One wrong trace, and a power supply becomes a fuse. Cadence.OrCad.v16.0-SHooTERS
So SHooTERS—the new one—was doing something desperate. The crack was the story
SHooTERS had been at it for 72 hours.