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  • Took one look at the hex dump and recognised it as an IFF format ("FORM" and a hunk type). Guess that makes me old.
    by vidarh
  • I really enjoyed "Hacking" Bard's Tale II Character as a kid. "Rex the Dino swings at a Barbarian 8 times for 900 points, killing them."

    Using the sector editor to mess with things, did seem to often turn the characters in to Dopplegangers for some reason.

    by jiscariot
  • Without looking it up, I believe "priscilla" or something close to that added a "Develop" (or similar, it's been decades) menu that you could use to, among other things, give yourself $10K more.

    Hex editing is way cooler though. I remember using tools that would scan memory for values so you could edit running game values. I used this for flash/browser games (IIRC) and you normally had to enter the current value multiple times for the tool to narrow down to the 1 memory location that held that value (health is 100, Search for 100, get XXXX results, cause health to drop to 95, search for 95, get XX results, rinse and repeat till you got to 1 result, edit that and you can change your health).

    by joshstrange
  • I'm sure several of us have a similar story for this game. The file format wasn't encrypted or anything. I wrote and published a small Perl program to give a save file the maximum money on launch day of the game.

    We were bored at work. We knew the game was coming out. So a coworker went to a store just before opening time and brought it back to the office. Three of us talked about the fastest type of thing to develop for it. The save file patcher was out on Usenet by lunch.

    by cestith
  • One of the first save files I modified was SimCity 2000. I had just learned about hex numbers and thought well they have to store my money somewhere so I just searched for the hex values of my current money and voila it was there. Also learned about signed/unsigned int ... as there is a max or you go negative
    by gullevek
  • I lament that these kinds of rogue explorations are less and less available to kids these days. Sure in many senses there's much more in the space to engage with, powerful tools like scratch and now LLMs to answer every question but I suspect most kids today will be nostalgic for some mobile game they have no agency to explore outside the rails or some online game that will ban you for cheating.

    Contrast that with experiences like the author and the taboo joys of rooting around in the files and "hacking" something to do the thing you want.

    by ticulatedspline
  • > I suspect that [modifying data in memory] is how the Game Genie for the Nintendo Entertainment System worked.

    Game Genie, Action Replay, and other similar devices worked on a different principle - the "codes" represented patches to the code in the game cartridge, not to data in memory. (The original Game Genie for the NES could patch up to three bytes.)

    In practice, these patches often amounted to simple modifications like changing the constant value used to initialize a "lives" or "health" variable, or patching out code which caused the player to take damage or die.

    by duskwuff
  • > SimCity 2000 was an isometric city-builder game. I'm not sure if it was well received,

    Hah, it's probably considered one of the greatest games of the 90s.

    by Sohcahtoa82

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