The "hack": -start a game with a normal tank VS ultra computer player as p2. -save the game (as a file). -open the game file. -read the ASCII text and just flip which player has which text.
Now, I had my ultra tank.
The game was shareware and he'd show up to ask you to pay the fee. After the trial period he'd start lobbing missiles at you. There was a basic editor you could open to adjust all the ship stats and weapons, so while you couldn't turn him friendly you could at least de-claw him.
I remember thinking it was weird how "easy" it was to work around, but it's hard to imagine the studio would care much: a pre-internet 14 year who loved the game that much is probably more useful as an ambassador than a paying customer.
I also remember that in EV Override you needed to stay below a certain amount of money to not trigger Captain Hector, and I would set the system clock back so it wouldn't think that the trial period had passed.
There are two modern spiritual successors to the EV games that might interest you if you haven't heard of them. Both are open source and have a decent amount of content (but aren't complete): Endless Sky, and Naev. Where the former is much closer to the old EV games in feel.
Something I wonder! Grateful :D
I imagine you could change the chances of mishaps, or start with $1M, or remove the limit of how many buffalo steaks you could bring back from a hunt.
There used to be program called Gamehack or something like that. Essentially you would start the game and point this application at said game in RAM, then take note of something like the score being "187" or whatever. Jump into 'Gamehack' and it would search for everything in memory with that value. You would then play for a little bit longer and once the score had changed, you could then jump into game hack and find which of those memory addresses had changed to the new score. Usually you would only have one, you could then change this number to what ever you wanted.
It was such a simple concept but it worked so well. Wouldn't be able to do something like that anymore due to all manner of sandboxing in action. Lost a tool, gained security.
Only other hack was messing with the vehicle stats in Vice City. Ended up with the firetruck that could jump the entire map. Good fun.
This class of programs absolutely still exists (see: every debugger, scanmem, GameConqueror, etc.).
Sandboxing doesn't prevent processes from inspecting the memory of other processes, it just prevents the sandboxed process from doing things it shouldn't.
Next step was trying to get the boot screen to display a MS-branded Borg cube but instead bricking the machine. Parents were not thrilled about that.
Man we had some good fun with that! It always ended with us boosting our cars so much they flew out of the map
Hitscan weapons for the win.
I had been teaching myself programming for a few of years and had recently gotten my hands on Turbo Pascal. I had just started dabbling in assembly as well. So I launched the game through the debugger and by stepping through functions, in assembly obviously since I didn't have source, I finally got to the place where it waited for me to input the game results.
It encoded the game result in a single register, and compared the value in that register to a value in another register which it had loaded the correct value into.
Using the surrounding code, I located the byte in the executable and replaced that one comparison instruction with one which compared one of the registers with itself, which of course was the same all day err day. Wrote a small program to apply the one-byte patch.
Took a lot of time, especially tracing to find the right place since I wasn't very good at using the debugger nor that proficient with assembly. But very satisfying when my buddy could just enter whatever result he wanted and enjoy the game.
After that I dropped cracking games and focused on save-game cheats which I did for a while until games added sanity checks or just had very dynamic save-game formats.
But to be honest I started before then, on the ZX Spectrum. First of all it was patching games to get infinite lives, or time. But later it became necessary to patch the loaders before you could even access the game-code - speedlock, bleeplock, etc.
Being able to pause a running game and peek/poke at the RAM would have been very useful for hacking games, though of course I'd still need to crack the loader to share the POKEs with other people.
That feeling of being the leetest of leet haxors just from editing some ini settings was pretty glorious.
Then there were the Duke Nukem 3D CON files...
wackplayer
This version is ok but I prefer the original which is easy enough to run via dos-box, emulators of similar ilk or even online in a few places:
https://archive.org/details/msdos_Scorched_Earth_1991
https://dos.zone/scorched-earth/
https://www.playdosgames.com/play/scorched-earth
I loved turning the explosion to the max and launching Nukes or Death Head MIRVs and watching the whole screen be annihilated. Despite many clones I've never found one that really captured the feel and fun of the original. I'd love to see a faithful remake that had a larger playing area though.
Not trying to be contrarian, but for factual correctness I'm going to point out that Scorched Earth is a clone of an earlier game, Tank Wars. I've played both and I agree that Scorched Earth had more to it, but it wasn't the original.
DOOM having stairs and up/down movement, and vertical elements to the level design was really revolutionary at the time.
This. After Doom, there were maaany releases where a studio had X out there, and then released [3D version of X]. Or also throw themselves onto the fps genre. Almost to the point of killing innovation.
Don't get me wrong: that, and the 'infinite' storage of CD-ROMs got us many nice games.
But neither did much to sharpen game developer's creativity skills. Many "me too! (meh..)" releases in that era.
years later i defeated the high score of Stephen Meek and realized with horror Oregon Trail was intended to teach patience not just dysentery damn you MECC!!
https://archive.org/details/TankWars_274
More unhinged fun IMO
Tank Wars came out in 1990, Tanks came out in 1991.
There were artillery games before Tank Wars, of course. But none, to my knowledge, had AI players and insane weapon purchases, which is what made the game really fun, and which Scorched Earth inherited.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game#Artillery_games...
Rollers! Lava! It’s like the author started with a simple tank war game and then just threw in every weird little effect they could code as a creative weapon.
There were all kinds of neat hacks.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140210122645/http://www.scorch...
Last time I tried this game, I think I had managed to get a hold of the original executable or something: the rate of turn for the turret was tied to CPU cycles. Paying it on a computer about a decade younger than the game made it quite impossible to aim, as the turret would spin several laps if you so much as looked at the arrow key
Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games
This made my whole day. Thank you.
Hard to understand for me why would anyone play this when they can play much funnier Worms. I mean I played Scorched Earth with my cousin before Worms existed, but once they released Worms why would we play it?
I am still playing Worms Armageddon in 2026 with my kids on PS3 at least once or twice a week (the original graphics didn't age very well for 4K TVs), though not retro levels, they are way too small, dunno why they didn't scale them up for higher resolution.
Most games of the era where 320x240 8 bit 256 colors, I had a 286 with 800x600 SVGA monitor and that game could actually use it although it was only 4 bit 16 color, don't think I ever played the 256 color in the last version.