Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scorched Earth 2000 – Web

scorch2000.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 154 posts

Re: Scorched Earth 2000 – Web

#61

Post by aidenn0 »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #51
walrus01 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early 90s DOS games were certainly quite creative. I mentally draw a dividing line between approximately the start of the era when the first Soundblaster became a common thing to find in affordable home x86 PCs, and early CD-ROM based games were also available (1991-1992), and the December 1993 release of DOOM and everything that came after. Very interesting era in the time frame in between there.

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 tha…

Warcraft II and Doom are both examples of, while not being the first in their genres, defining their genres and inspiring every studio to stop what they are doing and make something in that genre.

Re: Scorched Earth 2000 – Web

#63

Post by amarant »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #52
rhema wrote: post #27

9 year old me got my first "hacking" experience out of this game. With the shareware version, you could not select the ultra tank that could shoot 3 bullets for a human, but you COULD if it were the computer player. The "hack": -start a game with a normal tank VS ultra computer player as p2. -save the game (as a file). -open the game file. -read the ASCII text and just flip which player has which text. Now, I had my…

It would be a nice thread on here, to see what people's first hacks were, especially from that era when people were usually just alone and stumbling on these things.

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

Re: Scorched Earth 2000 – Web

#64

Post by amarant »

Ooh, and it's fully playable!

Last time I tried this game, I think I had managed to get a hold of the original executable or something: the rate of turn for the turret was tied to CPU cycles. Paying it on a computer about a decade younger than the game made it quite impossible to aim, as the turret would spin several laps if you so much as looked at the arrow key

Re: Scorched Earth 2000 – Web

#65

Post by walrus01 »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #51
walrus01 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early 90s DOS games were certainly quite creative. I mentally draw a dividing line between approximately the start of the era when the first Soundblaster became a common thing to find in affordable home x86 PCs, and early CD-ROM based games were also available (1991-1992), and the December 1993 release of DOOM and everything that came after. Very interesting era in the time frame in between there.

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 tha…

I think the big difference for me, after playing a lot of Wolfenstein 3D, was two things... The system I had it on didn't have the CPU to run wolf3d in something like a full screen size, it was something like a 386SX/20. By the time DOOM came around I had a much more capable desktop. Secondly, wolfenstein 3d was everything on a flat two dimensional plane of grey floor. There was one size of wall or door tile and everything had the same ceiling height and same wall height.

DOOM having stairs and up/down movement, and vertical elements to the level design was really revolutionary at the time.

Re: Scorched Earth 2000 – Web

#66

Post by Induane »

wingmanjd wrote: post #44
rhema wrote: post #27

9 year old me got my first "hacking" experience out of this game. With the shareware version, you could not select the ultra tank that could shoot 3 bullets for a human, but you COULD if it were the computer player. The "hack": -start a game with a normal tank VS ultra computer player as p2. -save the game (as a file). -open the game file. -read the ASCII text and just flip which player has which text. Now, I had my…

Mine was on a similar game, GORILLA.BAS. I would edit the banana code for a much bigger explosion. Lots of fun back in computer class!

I removed collision detection so I could throw bananas through buildings

Re: Scorched Earth 2000 – Web

#68

Post by el_benhameen »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #52
rhema wrote: post #27

9 year old me got my first "hacking" experience out of this game. With the shareware version, you could not select the ultra tank that could shoot 3 bullets for a human, but you COULD if it were the computer player. The "hack": -start a game with a normal tank VS ultra computer player as p2. -save the game (as a file). -open the game file. -read the ASCII text and just flip which player has which text. Now, I had my…

It would be a nice thread on here, to see what people's first hacks were, especially from that era when people were usually just alone and stumbling on these things.

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.

Re: Scorched Earth 2000 – Web

#69

Post by magicalhippo »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #52
rhema wrote: post #27

9 year old me got my first "hacking" experience out of this game. With the shareware version, you could not select the ultra tank that could shoot 3 bullets for a human, but you COULD if it were the computer player. The "hack": -start a game with a normal tank VS ultra computer player as p2. -save the game (as a file). -open the game file. -read the ASCII text and just flip which player has which text. Now, I had my…

It would be a nice thread on here, to see what people's first hacks were, especially from that era when people were usually just alone and stumbling on these things.

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

Re: Scorched Earth 2000 – Web

#70

Post by ticulatedspline »

Mother of all games. Played so much SE when I was younger, one of my all time favs.

This version is ok but I prefer the original which is easy enough to run via dos-box, emulators of similar ilk or even online in a few places:

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Scorched_Earth_1991

https://dos.zone/scorched-earth/

https://www.playdosgames.com/play/scorched-earth

I loved turning the explosion to the max and launching Nukes or Death Head MIRVs and watching the whole screen be annihilated. Despite many clones I've never found one that really captured the feel and fun of the original. I'd love to see a faithful remake that had a larger playing area though.

Post reply on HN