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Comment by mynegation | Hacker News Reader

Everyone has to start somewhere. These young lads “worked around” couple of educational platforms. 35 years ago I was hex dumping ZX Spectrum game saves and disassembling the program files to get more lives, infinite lives or just more ammo or whatever. That seemed easier and more interesting than getting good at games themselves.

I sometimes wonder if that kind of “not approved” intellectual curiosity can be used to augment education. Sort of like having old school alarm clocks that are designed to be disassembled.

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I did the same thing with Bolo on an Apple ][e - I never got very good at the game but I dumped the assembler code for the whole thing onto greenbar paper and marked it up with highlighters. Then gave myself infinite lives, made the maze walls penetrable, made myself invisible to the robots - all kinds of stuff.

The penetrable walls were the best, because if you drove your tank off the map, the graphics renderer would just look at whatever memory happened to be specified by your impossible coordinates, display eerie shifting structures that were the working memory of your code, and pretty quickly crash the whole machine writing the tank sprite into god knows what.

That was a fun summer. I wonder if my mom still has that greenbar printout in her basement.

When I was way way younger, I mucked about in our school's computer library and the network security (or rather, how the permissions were set up) until I figured out a way to run and share Halo and Soldier of Fortune 2 off of a networked USB stick (or maybe I just copied it to my computer and then shared it off of the HDD, the memory is pretty vague). This is back in the XP days.

It worked pretty well and we had many a play session with 10-16 kids, alt-tabs were pressed, until somehow they discovered we were playing games, and then a bit later they found some residual files that had my account as the initial creator set on them.

I got a 30 minute dressing down talk from the IT head, then again from my mentor, and then again from the 'dean' (our school system is a little different). Then I had detention after school for months.

No one ever asked me how I actually bypassed their network permissions. When I found another exploit weeks later, I never used it, but I also never told them.

That's a good point, you're definitely on to something I think. Reversing classes at a young age would be super engaging for kids as it's "not something you're supposed to do"

My mother is a teacher for ages 7-11 and I help out with her IT curricula sometimes. I think I might do some reversing with her next time I am with them!

Heh, I still use game trainers for games that have annoying grinds. The Assassin's Creed games come to mind. There is no way I'm spending 150 hours on grinding just to progress through a level gated region of the map.

Some people just want casual gaming and having part of the map locked off forever is depressing - in my case, Forza Horizon 5, never bothered to do the grind, just drive around aimlessly, but I want all the cars and interesting places to be open. Maybe a "casual mode" setting?

When I was 6 years old my older brother showed me how to use Copy ][ Plus/Edit (what was it called? This was 35 years ago) to edit my characters’ stats in the Bard’s Tale and other games. I’d learn to search for specific strings like a Character name and then twiddle bits to change level or whatever.

It made no sense to me until HS where I started to understand how I was editing a Data file, and more in college when I learned assembler.

I fondly remember playing Bard's Tale on one computer while using the other one to edit the character files and reverse engineering all the item codes and other statistics. Good times.

Hex-editing save game files to cheat at Civilisation 1 was what got me into open source, where I started working on improving the hex editor I was using, frhed, which was GPL.

I've been doing something similar but in the pursuit of graphics assets. Typical ZX Spectrum game was usually one blob of bytes containing everything it needed to run. I'd load the main game block into memory and run small assembly routine displaying a fragment of code on screen in a form of a window with dynamically configurable width and height. You could "slide" the window throughout whole memory block, which was quite fast, and eventually you'd find out something resembling backgrounds, sprites, fonts. Often they were of different dimensions, hence the dynamic window size. After few tweaks you'd find the offset and the size of assets and you could replace them easily. I'll never forget the Rocky Horror Show play-through with all the characters replaced with their other, rather obscene, versions. Well, not so mature when you think about it, but quite funny it was back then. If anything I've learned quite a few tricks about fitting a lot of assets into very limited memory.

I still do this on my iPhone. As long as you keep the bit count the same i.e. changing 12 points to 99 the code signing passes and you don’t need to do anything but edit the hex.

It sounds like you're saying iPhones have an easily exploitable code signing vulnerability. It's that correct?

That sounds more like a data format with length-prefixed fields.

Could you provide some more detail? Sounds interesting.

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