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cestith 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
Sohcahtoa82 16 hours ago [-]
> 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.
duskwuff 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
jiscariot 3 hours ago [-]
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.
gullevek 11 hours ago [-]
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
ticulatedspline 2 days ago [-]
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.
brokenmachine 14 hours ago [-]
My first ever "hack" was for Strip Poker on the C64.
When I looked on the disk, I saw that the pictures were listed as, eg LADY01 up to LADY05.
11 year old me was pretty excited when I thought, "what would happen if I renamed the files?"...
10729287 3 hours ago [-]
Same here with one of those CDs full of shareware in early 90s. Autorun.bat running an interface.exe when the disk was inserted into the family computer's drive. Navigating the flash interface, I found the adult section and instuctions to decrypt the pictures by calling a surcharged phone number. I browsed the CD and found the corresponding /folder full of lady01.ass or lady02.tits, can't remember the extension. Tried to rename files to .jpg. And it Worked.
I then made my very own .bat with "ren .tits .jpg" into that folder and had a great afternoon.
zamadatix 15 hours ago [-]
Most kids growing up in the 90s didn't have game genies or hack bits and bytes on computer games either. At least there weren't personalized ads or microtransactions infecting most games though, but whether or not one plays an open world sandbox and hacks at it or rides the rails of a "normal" game has always just been a choice certain kids are attracted to and certain kids aren't.
gxd 16 hours ago [-]
I think they will still do it. Steam has a ton of games with local storage and modding is highly encouraged in many of them. Additionally, there's a growing interest in classic gaming, in particular NES/SNES, even from people who didn't live through the early generations. These games will remain eternally hackable.
aaronax 16 hours ago [-]
The best selling game of all time is relatively recent and supremely hackable/mod-friendly. It also contains gameplay elements that simulate electricity and logic gates. People have built computers in-game.
Minecraft
ticulatedspline 2 hours ago [-]
Not sure how old the author is in the story, I imagine them at like 8-11 ish. I don't have kids so maybe my view is too narrow but of the peers I do have with kids near that range I don't think I know any of them that have a "computer".
many of them play minecraft but as far as I'm aware it's entirely on tablets.
Granted the vanilla experience offers lots of exploration and creativity beyond nearly anything I grew up with but it's still not the same feeling of roguish discovery described by the article.
ronsor 16 hours ago [-]
Minecraft is the exception that proves the rule, if you ask me
Took one look at the hex dump and recognised it as an IFF format ("FORM" and a hunk type). Guess that makes me old.
ssharp 1 hours ago [-]
Tell me you don't know what porntipsguzzardo means without telling me you don't know what porntipsguzzardo means.
exogeny 16 minutes ago [-]
One of the more disappointing gaming experiences I've had in my life was realizing that the core loop in this game basically boiled down to the proportion of zones to each other.
Everything else, all of the other settings, all of the other proportions like schools or police or whatever, doesn't matter. All window dressing. Bummer.
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.
Hah, it's probably considered one of the greatest games of the 90s.
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.
Using the sector editor to mess with things, did seem to often turn the characters in to Dopplegangers for some reason.
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.
When I looked on the disk, I saw that the pictures were listed as, eg LADY01 up to LADY05.
11 year old me was pretty excited when I thought, "what would happen if I renamed the files?"...
I then made my very own .bat with "ren .tits .jpg" into that folder and had a great afternoon.
Minecraft
many of them play minecraft but as far as I'm aware it's entirely on tablets.
Granted the vanilla experience offers lots of exploration and creativity beyond nearly anything I grew up with but it's still not the same feeling of roguish discovery described by the article.
Everything else, all of the other settings, all of the other proportions like schools or police or whatever, doesn't matter. All window dressing. Bummer.
- https://log.schemescape.com/posts/