I never cracked disk protections, but I did sometimes reverse engineer games to figure cheat codes, etc. One EA game I looked at was the Will Harvey's Zany Golf

I never cracked disk protections, but I did sometimes reverse engineer games to figure cheat codes, etc. One EA game I looked at was the Will Harvey's Zany Golf for the Amiga. I had read somewhere that there was a secret level (the mad scientist? Or maybe that was the last public level). I got reasonably good at it, but not good enough to unlock the level. I disassembled it, etc. It did not make any sense to me. With other games it was easier to find where in memory they kept game state. I ran out of tricks. I was young and not too experienced. Eventually I figured that it was not really written in 68k code. It was using some kind of interpreter. I hadn't read many books or studied CS at the time, so I didn't know that I was looking at a VM. Register A2 or A3 pointed to the current opcode. There was a jump table and each opcode handler ended with a jump to the dispatcher. I don't believe the opcodes were 6502 instructions or I would have recognised them. It would have been a reasonable candidate, since the original was written for the Apple //gs. I still never got to the secret level. I either gave up or damaged the disk.