Scorched Earth 2000 – Web (opens in new tab)

I did something similar for the sequel Escape Velocity Override when I was a kid. It also had the same Captain Hector. Though in my case I buffed my own ship's armor and shields instead. I was not very good at the game (still am not to be honest), so I kind of needed that anyway to get through it.

I also remember that in EV Override you needed to stay below a certain amount of money to not trigger Captain Hector, and I would set the system clock back so it wouldn't think that the trial period had passed.

There are two modern spiritual successors to the EV games that might interest you if you haven't heard of them. Both are open source and have a decent amount of content (but aren't complete): Endless Sky, and Naev. Where the former is much closer to the old EV games in feel.

Also, if the game is single-player, you don't care: Simply let the players enjoy the game how they want to enjoy it.

The difference being that editing the source code was the point of the BASIC examples provided with DOS/QBasic/GW-Basic (they’re there to teach you programming!)

We added other weapons to make a poor mans scorched earth as we were only allowed to make games.

After learning the secret of "breaking" protected BASIC programs in DOS (which involved a poke, as I recall), I remember making higher difficulty levels for a BASIC Star Trek game, because it just wasn't very hard.

I removed collision detection so I could throw bananas through buildings

Where would we be without computer class

Something I wonder! Grateful :D

oh man!!!!!! You reminded me my first gaming experience on a PC with oragne-green screen :D Awesome game

While not the first hack by a long shot and not even mine but I always loved the idea of how it worked.

There used to be program called Gamehack or something like that. Essentially you would start the game and point this application at said game in RAM, then take note of something like the score being "187" or whatever. Jump into 'Gamehack' and it would search for everything in memory with that value. You would then play for a little bit longer and once the score had changed, you could then jump into game hack and find which of those memory addresses had changed to the new score. Usually you would only have one, you could then change this number to what ever you wanted.

It was such a simple concept but it worked so well. Wouldn't be able to do something like that anymore due to all manner of sandboxing in action. Lost a tool, gained security.

Only other hack was messing with the vehicle stats in Vice City. Ended up with the firetruck that could jump the entire map. Good fun.

Opening Eye of the Beholder II save files and moving items in your inventory to detect the hex code.

Then trying other random codes and finding stuff in your inventory like animal carcass

Playing Omega (roguelike) on ATARI ST, there were food shops that you could buy stacks of fried lizard bites if I remember correctly? Anyways, I found out that if you bought the max amount 99999999, it would actually give you money. Baby's first buffer overflow. The only issue is that it would also put that amount in your inventory, so you were basically too slow to move and had to drop each stack so my towns were littered with stacks of lizard bites. I'm not sure where the bug was introduced and I never found it in the PC versions later on when I looked.

I had a Loki software demo of Heroes of Might and Magic 3 for Linux. Couldn't find the full game anywhere, certainly not legally. You could only play one scenario with one town. But from saving and comparing save files in a hex editor, I figured out how to play as the other towns, change heroes and skills etc. The key discovery was finding out that the saves were compressed with something very like gzip. The game complained that checksums didn't match when I loaded a decompressed->modified->recompressed save file, but it still worked just fine.

Saving a game in Bard’s Tale (for Amiga). Buying an item in a store. Saving the game again. Comparing the save files with a hand-rolled AmigaBASIC hex dumper to find the bytes that changed. Working out from there how it stored money balances in the file. Tweak a little… and voila, everyone in my party’s getting mithril plate and frost horns.

My first was almost kinda similar to GP: me and my cousin played a game called ReVolt, and found that you could make the cars go faster by changing their speed attribute in some text file we found just poking around the game files.

Man we had some good fun with that! It always ended with us boosting our cars so much they flew out of the map

Mine was very simple, just finding and playing with values in config.ini for Red Alert 2 so that I could have infinite Tanyas and such.

Next step was trying to get the boot screen to display a MS-branded Borg cube but instead bricking the machine. Parents were not thrilled about that.

Ooh the Dungeon Keeper demo actually had all of the characters, just not the art assets. So when I was 11 I modified the ini file and had invisible giants and vampire lords doing my bidding in my dungeon. I was very proud of myself.

Me as a kid realizing that the rate of fire on the shotgun was directly tied to the number of animation frames in the original Doom. Cue mecha super-extreme gatling shotgun and also mecha super-extreme choppy frame rate.

Hitscan weapons for the win.

Did anyone manage to cheat in Oregon Trail?

I imagine you could change the chances of mishaps, or start with $1M, or remove the limit of how many buffalo steaks you could bring back from a hunt.

Adding money to a CIV 1 save game file with the PCTOOLS hex editor.

Bypassed the anti-piracy manual check in the second Championship Manager[1] game for my buddy. It was a typical check at the time which in this case asked you to reference a table of soccer matches in the manual and enter the correct game results for one of the games, ie 1-3 or similar.

I had been teaching myself programming for a few of years and had recently gotten my hands on Turbo Pascal. I had just started dabbling in assembly as well. So I launched the game through the debugger and by stepping through functions, in assembly obviously since I didn't have source, I finally got to the place where it waited for me to input the game results.

It encoded the game result in a single register, and compared the value in that register to a value in another register which it had loaded the correct value into.

Using the surrounding code, I located the byte in the executable and replaced that one comparison instruction with one which compared one of the registers with itself, which of course was the same all day err day. Wrote a small program to apply the one-byte patch.

Took a lot of time, especially tracing to find the right place since I wasn't very good at using the debugger nor that proficient with assembly. But very satisfying when my buddy could just enter whatever result he wanted and enjoy the game.

After that I dropped cracking games and focused on save-game cheats which I did for a while until games added sanity checks or just had very dynamic save-game formats.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Championship_Manager_2

This might make a nice top-level Ask HN.

The whole cracking scene was where a lot us cut our teeth learning to use machine code debuggers.

I recall the INI files of Red Alert were an open book for modding the game mechanics. I had spies with silenced pistols and "tesla cufflinks". It was really fun making crates spawn super frequently. I also vaguely recall making one of the planes into a nuke carpet bombers (fun, but the forced delay each time a nuke went off was a tad annoying).

Then there were the Duke Nukem 3D CON files...

Dune 2 before that was similarly hackable. The level definitions were just text files with an encoding that only certain editors would open.

I did this exact same thing. I added a bunch of Monty Python quotes.

I played this game so much that I instantly recognised that name *G

Yes, it was.

Just played a round, think I found a bug - It was down to one other computer and myself. For some reason the power capped at 235, so neither of us could come close to hitting one another.

GORILLA.BAS is arguably part of the lineage too, somewhere in there.

I like Hedgewars which is an open source game similar to Worms but with hedgehogs. It is available as package in most Linux distros but also on Windows, Mac and FreeBSD. I believe it is available on Steam as well.

BOMB.EXE was my first.