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Comment by sircastor | Hacker News Reader

We had this game on a Mac in 7th grade. We'd play through the first part, then get to the copy protection scheme which was a room where you'd have to select the letter of the first sentence on page 7 or something. We'd guess constantly and occasionally get it right so we could play, but otherwise didn't have the manual.

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I loved Prince of Persia for MSDOS because it made me learn to "hack" / "crack" at computers.

I remember also being stuck on the first level and then on the copy-protection. Until one day while pressing random keyboard combinations I noted that a game was saved. At the same point, my father had this XTree Gold program in the computer (like DOSSHell but better), and it had a HEX view... when you opened the .SAV file in this view, you had only like 8 or 9 bytes. I remember my excitement when I changed that 01 to 02 and boom! after loading the game I started in level 2 .

Back in school (I was in 6th grade at that time) my friends had no clue what had I done to get past that copy protection level.

It was downhill for me and cracking at that point... I was not interested in playing but more on doing reverse engineering on different games and programs.

Similar story, but he editing doom and SimCity was a good time. A double barreled unlimited ammo shotgun made levels a little easier. or building a city with 2 billion dollars was fun.

There was a famous pool game with different formats (8-ball, 9-ball, snooker etc) in early 2000. The game-play was pretty realistic but it was demo version and it asked for 6 digit password to unlock all features. I just loaded the executable in editor and voila the only readable digits among the binary data was the password. It was pretty stupid of developers not to encrypt the password!

> It was pretty stupid of developers not to encrypt the password!

You are being very unfair to that era. Even cutting edge software like Norton Utilities did the same, although they XORed the passwords. That passed as encryption then.

Not if the idea is to get money from honest customers only. Most people who try to get the full game for free aren’t going to pay anyway.

Yes! We played through the first level so many times we found a way to beat it in ~90 seconds. If you lure out the guard on the right, the first in the game who protects the entrance to level 2, you can climb up through a false ceiling and drop down behind him. You never get the sword, but on level two you're assumed to have taken it and so you have it with you. This meant we could get a playthrough in once every hour or so of playing the first level...

Sometimes I would run to that guard and jump through him and finish the level very quickly. On a small but significant fraction of the times, his sword strike would miss so it was possible to skip him without luring/climbing. Since the success rate is low, this only makes sense for that guard, as losing to that guard has a low cost: you just restart the game.

Yes, not sure what triggers it but I would often see this random shift past an enemy with the skeleton later in the game. What a great game.

I remember on the PC one would type

C:\> prince megahit

to get unlimited lives and level skipping.

For Prince 2, the magic word was "makinit". Does anyone know if there is any meaning behind it?

If you open the executable in a text editor there is some text that actually tells you this code.

My first discovery of this game was also on a mac in 7th grade (in NOLA).

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