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Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

I think it was pretty standard, even used for testing.

God mode for example, that allows to fly through the map, is the OG of fast travel.

Nowadays computers are so powerful you can have full blown editor doing essentially all the cheat codes, but back in the day, you'd want to be testing the construction of X, something you don't have money for, so you'd press a few keys to change hex values and you'd have (maxvalue - current cash) instantly, so you could test more effectively.

Cheat codes would be hidden enough that regular players wouldn't find them but not impossible that players could use them.

I think the logic is, you've paid for the game, you should be able to access all the content.

Nowadays, since games are such big business, it's all too serious.

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My own experience testing video games back in the mists of time was you get assigned Level Nine, for example, and the entire game is a crashy stuck-in-the-floor mess where all of the low hanging fruit has already been reported. Without a cheat to get you to Level Nine you'll never even be able to do your "commute" there, much less do your job.

I remember back in the day a memory editor for DOS.

It was a TSR (terminate and stay resident, esentially a background process) that you'd load before firing up the game.

Once in the game, at any time you could press a hot key (F12, I think) and it would freeze the game and open a TUI with a hex editor where you could search for values (money, number of lives, whatever else you could think of), change them and go back to the game.

Fun days!

I forgot about that one! That was super nerdy and neat. Thanks!

Us slightly younger folk got to do similar stuff with cheat engines on consoles like the PSP. You'd configure a 'plugin' to be loaded by the CFW with the game, press some key combo to freeze the game and go fishing for cheats in memory (or use previously saved ones).

That kind of fiddling was such a big part of my developing an interest in computers and building a solid understanding of how all the magic works internally, it's a bit of a shame that kids nowadays can't really jump into fiddling around like that since the devices they'd play games on are much better locked down (or on PC, require you to already know what you're doing to be able to snoop around in another program's memory).

The memory cheats is how Game Genie worked!

On the playstation you would load the GG as a disc and then pop it open and load another disc, it felt like absolute hacker magic.

That’s what game genie was for cartridges too. You plug the game into the game genie into the console

All the Game Genies sat between the cartridge and console and intercepted and replaced accesses to specific ROM addresses. It didn't have the ability to access memory. Other devices like the Pro-Action Replay could modify memory and acted more like a TSR.

How would you figure out which memory location stored a given thing, e.g. # of lives?

AFAIK Cheat Engine[1] is the standard approach. There are some cool tutorial videos on YouTube.

[1] https://www.cheatengine.org/

I remember there were tools where you filtered all the matching values, then went back to game and played a little, came back filtered again, until one value stood out.

Indeed. I wrote an article a while back showing this in action with a Gamecube game running in an emulator: https://www.smokingonabike.com/2021/01/17/hacking-super-monk...

I remember doing this with the built-in tool of some emulator. They would let you filter by exact match and you could filter it down again after changing the value (losing a life).

But for stuff where exact matching wasn't practical like say a more or less continous health-bar, you could instead filter by searching for values that decreased / increased / didn't change.

Of course you would also have to guess at the data type but there weren't that many likely choices.

This is it. You'd mark the memory locations, go back to the game, repeat the search and filter down.

Either that, or you'd just go about trying one by one until you found it, then tried to figure out a pattern of what was around it and make notes on a paper for next time.

Hex editor with Ultima III I think we’d search for our character name and then start twiddling values until mom called us for dinner.

That technique worked in Windows 95, too. I used to "cheat" on Diablo 1 using WinHex to max out my gold and modify some item stats.

> Nowadays, since games are such big business, it's all too serious.

Interesting enough, you can often find the equivalent of cheat codes in the accessibility settings. Celeste is a good example.

Another reason for cheat codes: you can give them to reviewers, so they can look at all the content, without having to beat the game the normal, slow way.

Accessibility options can help a bit, but aren't implemented widely and aren't anywhere near as powerful as cheat codes and console commands. Being able to move between stages, spawn or remove objects and characters, or even just get your character unstuck can let you work around what would otherwise be game breaking bugs and provide many hours of entertainment.

Also, games were often not really multiplayer in those days so there was no impact on other players.

These days multiplayer is always roped into it like with GTA V just so they can milk those sweet microtransactions.

I heard that some games added cheat codes so that they could sell those guide books with all sorts of cheat codes in them. I remember seeing them at my scholastic book fair in elementary school.

Can't tell you how many games I've played like this:

- shoot. loot.

- fast travel, dump loot, fast travel return.

- shoot. loot.

...

In no particular order: Borderlands; Destiny; Tom Clancy’s(R) The Division; Fallout 3, New Vegas, 4; The Outer Worlds; Skyrim if you’re inclusive with the definition of shooting; Pokemon Snap 2 if you’re extra inclusive with the definition of looting.

Why would you even dump your loot in Borderlands? Money is absolutely meaningless in that game. You look at the comparison box to see if there are more green arrows and if not you leave it.

That’s rational and a fair critique. On the other hand, I can make the money number bigger. I’ll let you guess which wins out in my case.

You rarely visited shops then. Countless times I watched a top tier gun timing out in 3 minutes and I’m short on money.

Also, BL guns have lots of hidden parameters which may or may not correspond to (or be enhanced by) your build. Playing by green arrows alone is pretty… casual.

Well you see I grew up in a poor household so now I have scarcity mindset/hoarding mindset and I NEED to keep everything what if it's useful in the future or I can sell it for two bucks or or or or....

I like borderlands but good god is it a slog for me to play because I have to pick up ALL the loot and kill ALL the things and do ALL the side quests so now I'm 40 hours in on my first play through and haven't even beaten the game yet while all the normal people are talking about the new mechanics in super ultra extra hardcore vault hunter mode newgame++++

I downloaded a mod for Fallout 4 to make most things weightless so I could actually play the game instead of picking up every single 10mm round when I don't even use pistols.

I definitely hear you. I have a Skyrim save that still has ~18k "weight units" of loot that I need to sell. I recently started sizing it down from ~42k units. I used to just dump it all in a chest near the vendor I use when I need to clear space in the player inventory but then I installed a mod that lets me open an inventory with a spell. I could leave that 5 weight, 1 gold-value item behind but that's literally leaving money on the table.

idkfa

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