Is the software still attractive to use, after all those years, or why are you going to these extremes? Sounds it's somehow intimately intertwined with the dongle, if the check routines can't simply be patched.
People attempted to patch the routines decades ago and it never produced a stable result.
Going down this rabbit hole, I realize that ST hardware for musicians is still huge. And the dongles as still working as intended, apparently.
And then this blew my mind:
https://re-falcon.com
Quite the underground scene:
https://indyclassic.org