I actually cracked an Apple game in about 1990. It was incredibly easy. The Mac IIci had a debug button. Press it, and it would halt the CPU and throw you into

I actually cracked an Apple game in about 1990. It was incredibly easy. The Mac IIci had a debug button. Press it, and it would halt the CPU and throw you into a debugger mode. The key for cracking was that it had a disassembler, which would convert the binary back into assembly code (including any comments if they were left in). The game Tristan did not remove the comments from its code, so after disassembly, I could see the name of subroutines. One line was something similar to "GOSUB hexaddress" with the comment "doProtec". I naturally assumed this was a subroutine that would run the copy protection code. In those days it was one of those pop up windows that asked a question from a random page in the manual. A GOSUB and an address was two bytes of code, if I remember correctly. I used the Mac built in Hex editor to edit the binary for Tristan, found the GOSUB line with the correct hex address as its argument and replaced it with two NOOP commands, which were one byte each. I saved the binary file and played the game. And it worked! I could now play Tristan without having to answer the stupid questions from the manual every time.