Reverse Engineering

November 16th, 2007Blog2 comments

Warning — Nerd Content: When we were kids we used to cheat at Bard’s Tale for the Apple IIe by using a hex editor.

What is a hex editor? Well, back then we had floppy disks. 5 1/4″ floppy disks. Data from saved games would be written onto the discs in tracks and sectors.

In order to cheat at an RPG like Bard’s Tale, you would locate the specific track and sector where your characters’ saved data was written, then use a program called a hex editor to actually change those values and rewrite them to the disk.

When you loaded your game you would see that you had a bazillion more EXP or HP or whatever.

This took a lot of trial and error work. For instance, if your STR was 16, your INT was 14, and your DEX was 17, you would be looking for a string like ’100e11′, which is 16,14,17 in hexadecimal. Hexadecimal is, of course, base-16 numeration from 0 to F. So 255 would be ‘FF’, as anyone who has ever worked with HTML colors knows.

So you’d try to find those values in the hex editor, change them, boot up the game, and see if your changes took. You could change lots of little things just by tweaking the data at the hexadecimal level. Items, gold, etc..

I think I spent more time tweaking this data than playing the actual game. Because once you had super-strong characters it was pretty easy, and tweaking stuff with a hex editor was more interesting.

I love taking things apart. I take stories apart like this. I watch them or read them carefully, write down what happens, the cause and effect.

Sometimes I have a question or a problem I’m trying to figure out, so I write it down. Writing things down, taking things apart, seems to help me problem solve. Once something’s on paper it feels more concrete. The details are more available. Things are easier to connect.

I think once you take something that is seemingly magical and monolithic and break it down into its base components, its bricks, you see even more going on. You see behind the wizard’s curtain. You see the possibilities, and what you yourself can do with these bricks.

I like the idea that behind all of these extremely complex things are minute sets of rules and numbers.