Another retro post, from even earlier times than the last one.
Unfortunately, right after playing through the first chapter, we ran into something annoying: copy protection feature. One of the "Prince of Persia"-type where you would be asked a few questions and would need the original printed game manual to answer these correctly and play on.
And needless to say we didn't have the manual -- and of course, neither did the shop we bought the game from.
But all these sentiments aside, we were already hooked, and needed a way to play on.
Surely we had no Internet to look up the correct answers (there was no Google, no Chrome and even hardly any Internet Explorer yet!), we had no one to ask (the game was so out of mainstream, and the level of English command needed to play it was so untypical that we might well have been the only players in years). We also had nothing to tinker with the game with -- no hiew, no disassembler, no debugger proper.
We did have Game Wizard, a utility that you would normally use to save and reload in Tetris or make yourself infinite lives in Pacman. The way you do it would be to search the memory for "3" when you have 3 lives, then for "2" when you have 2 lives, and so on; with some luck you would find the address in memory that holds the lives variable for the game. You can then set it to 99 or freeze at 3 to get infinite lives.
And we gave it a try, for lack of anything better to do for the rest of the evening. We began by alternating memory searches in the state before vs. after the first question is answered -- hoping to reveal its correct answer by noticing different variable values depending on whether we chanced to answer correctly. Instead, we got:
As a wild guess I just set it to 4 instead...
...and got right through. (Apparently I inadvertently found the counter of the questions loop and moved right past it.)
All it took after that was to save the game (and the evening), granting us with endless hours of fun time.
This happened during my high school years when some of my friends already owned a computer but I had none. So we used to get together after school and binge play some video games -- starting with Lord of the Rings text adventures and Laser Squad hot-seats...
...and then, rummaging through then-abundant "bootleg software shops" (a post-USSR version of Game Stop, selling bunches of floppy disks with copied games or other software and with labels hand-printed on a 9-pin dot matrix printer) I discovered Eric the Unready (which you can actually play in an online emulator here).
I loved it at first sight. A wonderful piece of interactive fiction with hilarious jokes and puns, challenging puzzles and, myself an avid English learner at that time, an invaluable learning resource.
...and then, rummaging through then-abundant "bootleg software shops" (a post-USSR version of Game Stop, selling bunches of floppy disks with copied games or other software and with labels hand-printed on a 9-pin dot matrix printer) I discovered Eric the Unready (which you can actually play in an online emulator here).
I loved it at first sight. A wonderful piece of interactive fiction with hilarious jokes and puns, challenging puzzles and, myself an avid English learner at that time, an invaluable learning resource.
Unfortunately, right after playing through the first chapter, we ran into something annoying: copy protection feature. One of the "Prince of Persia"-type where you would be asked a few questions and would need the original printed game manual to answer these correctly and play on.
And needless to say we didn't have the manual -- and of course, neither did the shop we bought the game from.
Well, as a disclaimer... I do understand that software piracy is, in the big picture, bad bad BAD, but hey, we were 15 years old and had no idea of the big picture - nor any clue about copyrights and licensing. To us at that time, the fact that we had software on our computer meant that we could do as we pleased with it, especially given that we did buy it at a shop (sic!).
And even if someone were to lecture us on the proper course of action... At that time in that part of the world, an equivalent of $30 would be a decent monthly salary (yes, monthly, not daily, not hourly), and there was absolutely no way an ordinary person could possibly make a payment anywhere to a foreign country, or for that matter, to pay in any tender other than cash - no credit cards, no wire transfers, no bank accounts...
...so yes, I admit we were stealing apples from somebody else's garden, but quite unknowingly, almost unavoidably, and without causing anyone any real harm.
And even if someone were to lecture us on the proper course of action... At that time in that part of the world, an equivalent of $30 would be a decent monthly salary (yes, monthly, not daily, not hourly), and there was absolutely no way an ordinary person could possibly make a payment anywhere to a foreign country, or for that matter, to pay in any tender other than cash - no credit cards, no wire transfers, no bank accounts...
...so yes, I admit we were stealing apples from somebody else's garden, but quite unknowingly, almost unavoidably, and without causing anyone any real harm.
But all these sentiments aside, we were already hooked, and needed a way to play on.
Surely we had no Internet to look up the correct answers (there was no Google, no Chrome and even hardly any Internet Explorer yet!), we had no one to ask (the game was so out of mainstream, and the level of English command needed to play it was so untypical that we might well have been the only players in years). We also had nothing to tinker with the game with -- no hiew, no disassembler, no debugger proper.
We did have Game Wizard, a utility that you would normally use to save and reload in Tetris or make yourself infinite lives in Pacman. The way you do it would be to search the memory for "3" when you have 3 lives, then for "2" when you have 2 lives, and so on; with some luck you would find the address in memory that holds the lives variable for the game. You can then set it to 99 or freeze at 3 to get infinite lives.
And we gave it a try, for lack of anything better to do for the rest of the evening. We began by alternating memory searches in the state before vs. after the first question is answered -- hoping to reveal its correct answer by noticing different variable values depending on whether we chanced to answer correctly. Instead, we got:
XXXX:YYYY 01 02 01 02 01 02
As a wild guess I just set it to 4 instead...
...and got right through. (Apparently I inadvertently found the counter of the questions loop and moved right past it.)
All it took after that was to save the game (and the evening), granting us with endless hours of fun time.
No comments:
Post a Comment