I removed collision detection so I could throw bananas through buildings

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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...

  wackplayer

Don't I remember doom developing pretty organically from wolfenstein and a few other (what would now be called) first person shooters around that time? The name "hexen" is coming to mind too. I would put that whole era as the start of something new, so different from the strategy games and side-scrollers that preceded it. Those first person games were the first time I thought computer games were actually more fun than the console systems, which didn't really have anything similar.

Yeah, I remember our high school IT teacher buying a 486sx25 with 8MB and a CDROM ostensibly to explore multimedia in education but mostly to play Myst.

I feel like Mario 64 was another one of those and AAA never really left Doom or Mario 64.

Yeah, this is the one that ruled my homeroom during last bit of elementary school.

They had a shared ancestor in Tanx. I also remember Tank Wars fondly.

I was gonna say, this is totally tank wars!

Neat. The website looks the same (in a good way) from when I remember it over a decade ago - are you the creator of the original java port from back then?

https://web.archive.org/web/20140210122645/http://www.scorch...

I brought it back to life at one point as a Java Swing app for my kids, but the server side of things was still wonky. I'm glad to see that it's alive again, I had a lot of fun with this in the early 2000s.

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.

BOMB.EXE was my first.