4 ms·

Ah, this is familiar. Decades ago, I had more or less topped out playing Othello against my Apple ][e. A game could be completed in under ninety seconds, with

Ah, this is familiar. Decades ago, I had more or less topped out playing Othello against my Apple ][e. A game could be completed in under ninety seconds, with my moves being as fast as that of the computer. I took photos (with actual film) of beating the machine long before the board could be filled, but I was getting stale, essentially training myself to fight against this deterministic opponent who couldn't have been all that bright, given the time. I began to make deliberately bad choices in the early game to see if I could recover, but even that wore out. I eventually settled on POKEing parts of the memory where the game was held. Typically, this resulted in an un-runnable program, or the program would place pieces on the lines rather than between them, all sorts of oddball behavior. Every so often, though, I would get a working game that would play against me using the usual rules, but differently enough that it would throw me off. It was primitive but amusing.

wcarss 7y ago
This sounds like an amusement source for an immortal being locked in a prison with just an Apple ][e during a randomly selected century (decade? year?) of their existence -- maybe an unexplored subplot of groundhog day? Anyway, that's really cool!
- mturmon 7y ago
  > ...immortal being locked in a prison with just an Apple ][e... Sounds like me as a teenager.
  - munificent 7y ago
    I was about to post the same thing. People today can barely remember what time felt like before the invention of the Internet eradicated boredom.
    - jjuel 7y ago
      Did the internet actually eradicate boredom or did it just eradicate focus?
      - JauntyHatAngle 7y ago
        It definitely didn't eradicate focus. I was playing Runescape focused for hours as a kid.
kbenson 7y ago
> I eventually settled on POKEing parts of the memory where the game was held. Typically, this resulted in an un-runnable program, or the program would place pieces on the lines rather than between them, all sorts of oddball behavior. Every so often, though, I would get a working game that would play against me using the usual rules, but differently enough that it would throw me off. And thus the idea of the Game Genie is discovered again. Regarding Othello (Reversi), I actually wrote a Reversi game for the Roku and released it on their store. It was a fun little one-off that I was playing around with when a friend and I were exploring the Roku, which I eventually just packaged up and released as a free version and paid version. It allowed you to set board width and height and choose if the white/black players were CPU controlled or human controlled, so you could actually have the Roku play itself if you wanted. I believe I had three different skill levels for the CPU, which really just corresponded to how deep the minmax AI would go (how many turns in the future it would look), and I think it was fairly hard at the hard level IIRC (but if you chose a large board, like 16x16, it might take 20 seconds or more for it to make a move). I actually had plans to extend the paid version with some new features, and had a dev build that included things such as random non-color blocks on the board, "bomb" pieces that when flipped flipped the 8 surrounding pieces, angle blocks to change the line by 90 degrees, etc. I never actually bothered to get that out though. I haven't looked in a long time, but at the time I don't think there was anything out on iOS/Android that had something like that, but it seemed like a fun take on the game. If someone hasn't gotten around to releasing something like that, they should...
- at_a_remove 7y ago
  I might just see if I can find that! That sounds like a great project.
- joshschreuder 7y ago
  The idea of Game Genie is very much still a thing, most notably with Cheat Engine: https://www.cheatengine.org/ https://www.cheatengine.org/
  - mebo 7y ago
    Which is more powerful than any game genie by a great amount, with its included debugging tools - really not just useful for games, but in general for all sorts of RE on Windows. Sadly only on Windows, I've always hoped that maybe they would add support for GDB stubs some time - there is a remote mode already, afaik. It's also surprisingly all written in Pascal(or Free Pascal) which is actually a pretty pleasant language(even if not very popular anymore), if anyone's ever curious: https://github.com/cheat-engine/cheat-engine https://github.com/cheat-engine/cheat-engine

wcarss 7y ago

This sounds like an amusement source for an immortal being locked in a prison with just an Apple ][e during a randomly selected century (decade? year?) of their existence -- maybe an unexplored subplot of groundhog day? Anyway, that's really cool!

mturmon 7y ago
> ...immortal being locked in a prison with just an Apple ][e... Sounds like me as a teenager.
- munificent 7y ago
  I was about to post the same thing. People today can barely remember what time felt like before the invention of the Internet eradicated boredom.
  - jjuel 7y ago
    Did the internet actually eradicate boredom or did it just eradicate focus?
    - JauntyHatAngle 7y ago
      It definitely didn't eradicate focus. I was playing Runescape focused for hours as a kid.

kbenson 7y ago

> I eventually settled on POKEing parts of the memory where the game was held. Typically, this resulted in an un-runnable program, or the program would place pieces on the lines rather than between them, all sorts of oddball behavior. Every so often, though, I would get a working game that would play against me using the usual rules, but differently enough that it would throw me off. And thus the idea of the Game Genie is discovered again. Regarding Othello (Reversi), I actually wrote a Reversi game for the Roku and released it on their store. It was a fun little one-off that I was playing around with when a friend and I were exploring the Roku, which I eventually just packaged up and released as a free version and paid version. It allowed you to set board width and height and choose if the white/black players were CPU controlled or human controlled, so you could actually have the Roku play itself if you wanted. I believe I had three different skill levels for the CPU, which really just corresponded to how deep the minmax AI would go (how many turns in the future it would look), and I think it was fairly hard at the hard level IIRC (but if you chose a large board, like 16x16, it might take 20 seconds or more for it to make a move). I actually had plans to extend the paid version with some new features, and had a dev build that included things such as random non-color blocks on the board, "bomb" pieces that when flipped flipped the 8 surrounding pieces, angle blocks to change the line by 90 degrees, etc. I never actually bothered to get that out though. I haven't looked in a long time, but at the time I don't think there was anything out on iOS/Android that had something like that, but it seemed like a fun take on the game. If someone hasn't gotten around to releasing something like that, they should...

at_a_remove 7y ago
I might just see if I can find that! That sounds like a great project.
joshschreuder 7y ago
The idea of Game Genie is very much still a thing, most notably with Cheat Engine: https://www.cheatengine.org/ https://www.cheatengine.org/
- mebo 7y ago
  Which is more powerful than any game genie by a great amount, with its included debugging tools - really not just useful for games, but in general for all sorts of RE on Windows. Sadly only on Windows, I've always hoped that maybe they would add support for GDB stubs some time - there is a remote mode already, afaik. It's also surprisingly all written in Pascal(or Free Pascal) which is actually a pretty pleasant language(even if not very popular anymore), if anyone's ever curious: https://github.com/cheat-engine/cheat-engine https://github.com/cheat-engine/cheat-engine