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Scorched Earth 2000 – Web

scorch2000.com

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Re: Scorched Earth 2000 – Web

#81

Post by Barbing »

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!

Where would we be without computer class

Something I wonder! Grateful :D

Re: Scorched Earth 2000 – Web

#82

Post by alterom »

Cpoll wrote: post #34
alterom wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We played Tank Wars by Kenny Morse, it's from 1990 and preceded Scorched Earth: https://archive.org/details/TankWars_274 More unhinged fun IMO

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

Nah, Ken Morse's Tank Wars really was the mother of all artillery games.

Tank Wars came out in 1990, Tanks came out in 1991.

There were artillery games before Tank Wars, of course. But none, to my knowledge, had AI players and insane weapon purchases, which is what made the game really fun, and which Scorched Earth inherited.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game#Artillery_games...

Re: Scorched Earth 2000 – Web

#83

Post by stevekemp »

b3lvedere wrote: post #78
stevekemp wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very much so. Fixing software so that they correctly recognized my preferred serial number of #12345 was valid. Using soft-ice to register itself was always a deeply ironic. But to be honest I started before then, on the ZX Spectrum. First of all it was patching games to get infinite lives, or time. But later it became necessary to patch the loaders before you could even access the game-code - speedlock, bleeplock, e…

I remember saving a lot of allowance so i could buy the Multiface One for the ZX Spectrum. Instant hacking and saving possibilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiface

I never had one, and often lamented it!

Being able to pause a running game and peek/poke at the RAM would have been very useful for hacking games, though of course I'd still need to crack the loader to share the POKEs with other people.

Re: Scorched Earth 2000 – Web

#84

Post by jxf »

HerbManic wrote: post #72
jasonfarnon wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> 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.

This class of programs absolutely still exists (see: every debugger, scanmem, GameConqueror, etc.).

Sandboxing doesn't prevent processes from inspecting the memory of other processes, it just prevents the sandboxed process from doing things it shouldn't.

Re: Scorched Earth 2000 – Web

#85

Post by invalidusernam3 »

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…

This reminds me of something similar I did as a teenager in the 90s. Also some shareware game, can't remember exactly what it was about (I think a submarine game?). The shareware version only gave access to the first map. After digging around the files I found that it included all the maps and simply renaming map n to map 1's file name allowed you to play it

Re: Scorched Earth 2000 – Web

#88

Post by vintermann »

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.

I had a Loki software demo of Heroes of Might and Magic 3 for Linux. Couldn't find the full game anywhere, certainly not legally. You could only play one scenario with one town. But from saving and comparing save files in a hex editor, I figured out how to play as the other towns, change heroes and skills etc. The key discovery was finding out that the saves were compressed with something very like gzip. The game complained that checksums didn't match when I loaded a decompressed->modified->recompressed save file, but it still worked just fine.

Re: Scorched Earth 2000 – Web

#89

Post by skirmish »

reconnecting wrote: post #87
skirmish wrote: post #49

In my first job after graduation in a small company I was talking to the VP of engineering, and he mentioned offhand: "yeah, I wrote Scorch when I was in college". Mind blown.

Must be Wendell Hicken. https://www.whicken.com/

Yes, it was.

Re: Scorched Earth 2000 – Web

#90

Post by thih9 »

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!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game)
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