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Also brings back memories for me. I was never good at managing many cities, focusing on a few megacities instead and opting for large scale nuclear war :) Kinda

by jd20 9y ago

Also brings back memories for me. I was never good at managing many cities, focusing on a few megacities instead and opting for large scale nuclear war :) Kinda reminds me of another game I used to play around that time, Global Effect. Civ.exe was also the first game I customized. I was entertained to no end when I found out you could use a hex editor to change the strings. I rewrote the introductory text, and gave all the leaders new dialogue. That was also probably around when I started getting more interested in how games worked, rather than just playing them...

Namrog84 9y ago
As an amateur game developer and professional developer. I got into both because of similar origins of things. I do wonder though how modern games and tools are both easier to use but also more complex how it will shape the next few generations of devs and game designers.
alanfalcon 9y ago
RedEdit in the system 7 days was a godsend in my life. Hacking new sounds into Maelstrom. Changing character names in Pararena. Stumbling into learning what a sprite was.
- kolpa 9y ago
  ResEdit. A word I haven't seen in decades, still one ECC pointer hop from top-of-mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit
  - kzrdude 9y ago
    And it was a staple of Escape Velocity plugin editing too. Very fun program for a child with an old mac at that time.
- lowdest 9y ago
  The ResEdit days! I changed every sound in Marathon to the point it was unplayable. I had no idea what I was doing but I was fascinated.
  - alanfalcon 9y ago
    I don’t think it involved ResEdit but we once changed the Starcraft sounds at one computer in the school Mac lab so that when you made a dragoon it would play “carrier has arrived.” Freaked opponents out all the time.
mustacheemperor 9y ago
>interested in how games worked, rather than just playing them I've commented on HN before about the power I think "hackable" games had teaching us how to create on the computer. I have a similar fond memory of heavily tampering with Halo PC via the fan-made Halo Editing Kit, which gave hex access to do all kinds of fun things. Those summer weekends spent changing which side I played on Silent Cartographer were key to me becoming more than "just" a computer user.
- ansible 9y ago
  I've hacked just a couple games back in the day. One was this Galaga clone for the TRS-80 Color Computer. The CoCo had a couple analog joysticks [1] which were ergonomically horrible. The player would move the joystick left and right to position the on-screen spaceship. The x-position of the joystick would correspond to where the spaceship would be. However, you couldn't just let the player move the joystick quickly from one side of the screen to the other, that would be "unrealistic" video game physics, and from a gameplay perspective, would make it too easy to dodge incoming bullets. So the ship would move slowly on the screen until it reached the position which corresponded to the joystick position. This was rather annoying and hard to control. Since I had seen an article to convert a digital joystick (from an Atari 2600) to be used on the CoCo, I also modified the game code to use a more normal control scheme. That involved searching through the disassembled code to find the joystick polling routine, and patch it out with my on version instead. Which, unfortunately, didn't fit, so I had to jump out to a bit of code past the normal end of the program, and then jump back when finished. Fun times! [1] https://goo.gl/images/A2DAQK https://goo.gl/images/A2DAQK
Scoundreller 9y ago
My life got strange and confusing when my sibling used the hex editor to start making those changes to the hex editor itself.
usrusr 9y ago
> I rewrote the introductory text I remember eventually seeing "my" intro texts on the computers of people who had absolutely no chance of understanding the terrible in-jokes I put in there years earlier. Fortunately they did not know who ruined the experience for them. We had absolutely no concept of "legitimate copy" at the time, I had one industrially labeled disk (Genius mouse driver) and its existence confused me to no end.

by jd20 9y ago

Namrog84 9y ago

As an amateur game developer and professional developer. I got into both because of similar origins of things. I do wonder though how modern games and tools are both easier to use but also more complex how it will shape the next few generations of devs and game designers.

alanfalcon 9y ago

RedEdit in the system 7 days was a godsend in my life. Hacking new sounds into Maelstrom. Changing character names in Pararena. Stumbling into learning what a sprite was.

kolpa 9y ago
ResEdit. A word I haven't seen in decades, still one ECC pointer hop from top-of-mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit
- kzrdude 9y ago
  And it was a staple of Escape Velocity plugin editing too. Very fun program for a child with an old mac at that time.
lowdest 9y ago
The ResEdit days! I changed every sound in Marathon to the point it was unplayable. I had no idea what I was doing but I was fascinated.
- alanfalcon 9y ago
  I don’t think it involved ResEdit but we once changed the Starcraft sounds at one computer in the school Mac lab so that when you made a dragoon it would play “carrier has arrived.” Freaked opponents out all the time.

mustacheemperor 9y ago

>interested in how games worked, rather than just playing them I've commented on HN before about the power I think "hackable" games had teaching us how to create on the computer. I have a similar fond memory of heavily tampering with Halo PC via the fan-made Halo Editing Kit, which gave hex access to do all kinds of fun things. Those summer weekends spent changing which side I played on Silent Cartographer were key to me becoming more than "just" a computer user.

ansible 9y ago
I've hacked just a couple games back in the day. One was this Galaga clone for the TRS-80 Color Computer. The CoCo had a couple analog joysticks [1] which were ergonomically horrible. The player would move the joystick left and right to position the on-screen spaceship. The x-position of the joystick would correspond to where the spaceship would be. However, you couldn't just let the player move the joystick quickly from one side of the screen to the other, that would be "unrealistic" video game physics, and from a gameplay perspective, would make it too easy to dodge incoming bullets. So the ship would move slowly on the screen until it reached the position which corresponded to the joystick position. This was rather annoying and hard to control. Since I had seen an article to convert a digital joystick (from an Atari 2600) to be used on the CoCo, I also modified the game code to use a more normal control scheme. That involved searching through the disassembled code to find the joystick polling routine, and patch it out with my on version instead. Which, unfortunately, didn't fit, so I had to jump out to a bit of code past the normal end of the program, and then jump back when finished. Fun times! [1] https://goo.gl/images/A2DAQK https://goo.gl/images/A2DAQK

Scoundreller 9y ago

My life got strange and confusing when my sibling used the hex editor to start making those changes to the hex editor itself.

usrusr 9y ago

> I rewrote the introductory text I remember eventually seeing "my" intro texts on the computers of people who had absolutely no chance of understanding the terrible in-jokes I put in there years earlier. Fortunately they did not know who ruined the experience for them. We had absolutely no concept of "legitimate copy" at the time, I had one industrially labeled disk (Genius mouse driver) and its existence confused me to no end.