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Comment by fullstop | Hacker News Reader

I played ZZT a lot, and found that you could unlock the other levels with a hex editor by just changing their name in the binary. From there, you could open it up in the editor and figure out how they implemented a lot of their stuff. ZZT-OOP was very quirky, but so cool for the time!

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I went back to this since I was just a wee lad when I did this, and it's not quite what I remembered but I was close. You have to change the string "SECRET" in the header to anything else. At this point you can load the file into the board editor and see how things were done.

Here is an image of TOWN.ZZT loaded into the editor: https://i.imgur.com/mb9OFno.png

And here is the pascal string "SECRET" changed to "NECRET": https://i.imgur.com/kbh5xAm.png

I'm surprised that 12-year old me thought to do this.

To be exact, what you're editing is an array of ten 20-byte Pascal strings (so length-prefixed) which contain the world's flags. A ZZT Object can set or clear flags which are carried across boards; this mechanism was repurposed to add the "SECRET" flag, which blocks editing with the built-in ZZT Editor.

Unless... you use the "?" key to open the cheat console, and type in "+DEBUG" as a command (in ZZT 3.1+, IIRC) - then it will let you open the worlds and edit them as-is.

Yes, I dug in a bit further and found where it was checked in the editor. (at least in the reconstruction!)

https://github.com/asiekierka/reconstruction-of-zzt/blob/mas...

It looks like the SECRET flag was intended to prevent editing of both save files and built-in worlds.

The save file check is separate to the SECRET flag, but they are both meant to not be editable. (Of course, community-made external editors like KevEdit lift this restriction.)

I understand. With that being said, changing "SECRET" to "NECRET" and then saving results in a .SAV file with "SECRET" in place again.

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