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EmX_3000 | on: Show HN: After a decade of reversing, I got co-op working in DOS Wing Commander
This reminds me of how I used to cheat at certain games back in the 8-bit olden days. You could change one thing at a time, save, then look through and see what changed on the disk. Eventually you could identify all the locations that held the values for inventory, stats, location, quest stages, NPC state, and so on. All you had to do after that was change those locations and - hopefully - you're all powered up. With the WozMon you could even find the locations in memory, sometimes, and have "free" healing spells, for instance, any time you like by popping open the monitor and just changing the values in RAM. Among people my age this is the usual way you'd get started with something resembling hacking. It seems like the author is doing the same type of thing. This is also the basis of cheats and trainers for games, action games tended to be easier and there might only be a handful of flags and variables making cheat menus practical. For RPGs the cheats came in the form of lists of locations on the disk, eventually though there were disk-based full blown character editors available for some handful of games. Also about the same time, some developers started to go to extreme lengths to keep people from cheating by tampering with their save game files. This became quite common in the industry by the 32-bit era.

EDIT: I will point out that people would often submit letters to computer magazines with the memory locations of popular games as time went on. But this could take months or a year or more, and a game might never have its secrets laid bare so I suspect a LOT of people just did it manually at home.

InsidiousWombat | parent | next
I remember how VtM: Bloodlines went as much as write entire voice acted lines for tutorial NPC making fun of you if you cheated in character creation.

That was, mind you, in game released prematurely with ton of bugs. They found time for that.

How I know that ? I didn't cheat knowingly. I just used the editor, couldn't make up my mind and I was going between the steps once or twice. I thought I forgot to spend some skill points, turned out when you went back to the skills screen, the ones you picked stayed but the game gave you new set of points to spend

They found the time for cheater heckling but not to make their character creator work right ;)

photios | parent | next
> With the WozMon you could even find the locations in memory

Never heard of WozMon before. I was a happy Game Wizard user :D

https://web.archive.org/web/19970119194137/http://www.gwiz.c...

t3r | parent | next
Wow, thanks for the fascinating bit of history! Sharing memory addresses through computer magazines sounds like a paper-based BBS, haha. I guess I'm just a Cheat Engine kid, though
daniel_rh | parent | next
Yes! I remember finding out which integer was the money in my Sim City save. And I remember when I figured out the build order list for Star Trek: Armada 2 and fixed the Borg AI to be so formidable that we'd have to play the First Contact sound track at full blast to even have a chance of winning against 3 Borg players.
EmX_3000 | root | parent
By later times it seems this was tougher, I remember trying it with Ultima IX and utterly failing to locate a single relevant memory location after a solid week.
daniel_rh | root | parent
Ya especially with DRM or multiplayer lockdown measures.

But there is still a revolution where most game files are JSON or plain text (like that build list from Star Trek Armada 2).

EmX_3000 | root | parent
Dwarf Fortress is like this too, in fact much of the game can be modded from such files. I like that, but I do understand the frustrations of the developer who not only saw their games cracked but also trained back in the day. It presaged what was to come heh.
asdff | parent
The arms race honestly was so foolish. The era being discussed especially being pre achievements, pre internet in a lot of ways as we know it. So what if someone cheats in a ps2 game. Doesn’t hurt anyone.

And then you have to figure the devs realize you can do this and reverse engineer the entire game anyhow. Why even obfuscate it is the real question. Makes their workflow a little more awkward potentially and doesn’t do the intended thing.

I blame the nontechnical C suite. They don’t understand what I just wrote. So to them, this instead makes perfect sense. Lock it down, never mind why or if the lock works, just lock it and tell me its done. Command comes from upon high and so marches the industry and the hackers after them.