Hacker News

points by daniel_rh 3 days ago | 0 comments

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 3 days ago

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.

[–] adzm 2 days ago

Not sure what game's save file it was, but I remember learning about big vs little endian this way. And before that, why I would suddenly get negative money if I made it too big!

[–] daniel_rh 3 days ago

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 3 days ago

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.