Same here - I remember when you'd get games as .COM file with a nag screen/message etc that you could just skip over by flipping a jump instruction...
I remember being super puzzled when I tried that with a .exe and it didn't work
I remember being super puzzled when I tried that with a .exe and it didn't work
Hyperspeed was an interesting one. The crack that comes with the Steam version doesn't actually work since it triggers a lockup the first time you use the spindrive, so players just disable the crack and play the game normally with a PDF manual. I spent a long time trying to bypass that copy protection screen and all the checks to see if I'd bypassed it, but every time I thought I'd finally nailed it I ran into a new place the game would intentionally lock up. Ultimately I just truncated the word match table to a single entry so the word would always be the same. That was a single-byte change.
I looked at DOS .exe (NE? or was that the format for Win 3.1...) format too. Still relatively simple. Then came the PE which was super complicated.
As a teenager who didn't know any better, it was empowering to gain that level of access to a computer, to realize a certain level of control over it that was previously abstracted away. It felt like some insider knowledge that I was becoming aware of.