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Hacking SimCity 2000 saved games

45 points · 25 comments · zdw

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ticulatedspline · 1790729291 · focus · HN ↗
I lament that these kinds of rogue explorations are less and less available to kids these days. Sure in many senses there's much more in the space to engage with, powerful tools like scratch and now LLMs to answer every question but I suspect most kids today will be nostalgic for some mobile game they have no agency to explore outside the rails or some online game that will ban you for cheating.
Contrast that with experiences like the author and the taboo joys of rooting around in the files and "hacking" something to do the thing you want.
1. aaronax · 1790807385 · focus · HN ↗
  The best selling game of all time is relatively recent and supremely hackable/mod-friendly. It also contains gameplay elements that simulate electricity and logic gates. People have built computers in-game.
  Minecraft
  1. ronsor · 1790808197 · focus · HN ↗
    Minecraft is the exception that proves the rule, if you ask me
    crtasm · 1790808690 · focus · HN ↗
    Have you seen sites like <a href="https://www.moddb.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.moddb.com/ <a href="https://gamebanana.com/" rel="nofollow">https://gamebanana.com/ etc? The modding scene always seems very active when I drop in there
  2. ticulatedspline · 1790860381 · focus · HN ↗
    Not sure how old the author is in the story, I imagine them at like 8-11 ish. I don't have kids so maybe my view is too narrow but of the peers I do have with kids near that range I don't think I know any of them that have a "computer".
    many of them play minecraft but as far as I'm aware it's entirely on tablets.
    Granted the vanilla experience offers lots of exploration and creativity beyond nearly anything I grew up with but it's still not the same feeling of roguish discovery described by the article.
2. gxd · 1790807787 · focus · HN ↗
  I think they will still do it. Steam has a ton of games with local storage and modding is highly encouraged in many of them. Additionally, there's a growing interest in classic gaming, in particular NES/SNES, even from people who didn't live through the early generations. These games will remain eternally hackable.
3. zamadatix · 1790810723 · focus · HN ↗
  Most kids growing up in the 90s didn't have game genies or hack bits and bytes on computer games either. At least there weren't personalized ads or microtransactions infecting most games though, but whether or not one plays an open world sandbox and hacks at it or rides the rails of a "normal" game has always just been a choice certain kids are attracted to and certain kids aren't.
4. brokenmachine · 1790814748 · focus · HN ↗
  My first ever "hack" was for Strip Poker on the C64.
  When I looked on the disk, I saw that the pictures were listed as, eg LADY01 up to LADY05.
  11 year old me was pretty excited to try renaming the files...
  1. 10729287 · 1790856664 · focus · HN ↗
    Same here with one of those CDs full of shareware in early 90s. Autorun.bat running an interface.exe when placing the disk in the family computer, me curious about the adult section, then found the corresponding folder full of lady01.ass or lady02.tits, can't remember the extension. Tried to rename files to .jpg.
    It Worked. I then made my very own .bat with "ren .tits jpg" into that folder and had a great afternoon.
Sohcahtoa82 · 1790809385 · focus · HN ↗
> SimCity 2000 was an isometric city-builder game. I'm not sure if it was well received,
Hah, it's probably considered one of the greatest games of the 90s.
1. OrderlyTiamat · 1790868817 · focus · HN ↗
  and is still available on GOG for basically free!
  Good times, makes me nostalgic.
2. Markoff · 1790941444 · focus · HN ↗
  > Hah, it's probably considered one of the greatest games of the 90s.
  that's a bit stretch for majority (personally I loved building strategies), but sure one of the greatest building strategies right there with Transport Tycoon and UFO:EU (though that's not entirely building/researching)
duskwuff · 1790822221 · focus · HN ↗
[delayed]
gullevek · 1790825432 · focus · HN ↗
One of the first save files I modified was SimCity 2000. I had just learned about hex numbers and thought well they have to store my money somewhere so I just searched for the hex values of my current money and voila it was there. Also learned about signed/unsigned int ... as there is a max or you go negative
vivzkestrel · 1790827574 · focus · HN ↗
- posts page is down?
- <a href="https://log.schemescape.com/posts/" rel="nofollow">https://log.schemescape.com/posts/
vidarh · 1790845465 · focus · HN ↗
Took one look at the hex dump and recognised it as an IFF format ("FORM" and a hunk type). Guess that makes me old.
jiscariot · 1790856039 · focus · HN ↗
I really enjoyed "Hacking" Bard's Tale II Character as a kid. "Rex the Dino swings at a Barbarian 8 times for 900 points, killing them."
Using the sector editor to mess with things, did seem to often turn the characters in to Dopplegangers for some reason.
ssharp · 1790862626 · focus · HN ↗
Tell me you don't know what porntipsguzzardo means without telling me you don't know what porntipsguzzardo means.
1. Scaled · 1790878843 · focus · HN ↗
  I still remember 'priscilla' all these years later -- though I had to look it up to remember what it does (debug menu, apparently).
cestith · 1790863419 · focus · HN ↗
I'm sure several of us have a similar story for this game. The file format wasn't encrypted or anything. I wrote and published a small Perl program to give a save file the maximum money on launch day of the game.
We were bored at work. We knew the game was coming out. So a coworker went to a store just before opening time and brought it back to the office. Three of us talked about the fastest type of thing to develop for it. The save file patcher was out on Usenet by lunch.
exogeny · 1790865452 · focus · HN ↗
One of the more disappointing gaming experiences I've had in my life was realizing that the core loop in this game basically boiled down to the proportion of zones to each other.
Everything else, all of the other settings, all of the other proportions like schools or police or whatever, doesn't matter. All window dressing. Bummer.
1. db48x · 1790880905 · focus · HN ↗
  Technically you must balance the population and jobs numbers rather than the number of zoned tiles, but that is only one step away. Most of the challenge becomes maintaining the balance as the density of your zones changes over time.
  Cities: Skylines has a much more interesting simulation, but if you examine the CPU requirements you can easily imagine why Maxis didn’t take the same approach until 2013.
OptionOfT · 1790876359 · focus · HN ↗
I remember looking at the amount of $ I had in Red Alert 2, ALT+TAB-ing out of the game, then using some RAM modifying tool to search for the value and bumping it. Good times.
Now to get more currency in Assassins Creed I have to take out my credit card. Parts of the game where you earn this currency in-game are bugged, so I don't get all the currency I am owed. And when I make I try to spend the currency I get this ominous warning that this payment cannot be reversed.
db48x · 1790880556 · focus · HN ↗
I remember discovering hex editing when I was a kid too. I used the hex editor built into a commercial editor that my father had bought called VEdit.
I remember using it to edit some DOS directory entries and accidentally corrupting them.
I remember when a friend and I were playing Spacewar. He was disappointed (or annoyed) that it said “May the farce be with you!” when it exited, so I showed him how to correct it to “force” using the hex editor.
Great times!
joshstrange · 1790951994 · focus · HN ↗
Without looking it up, I believe "priscilla" or something close to that added a "Develop" (or similar, it's been decades) menu that you could use to, among other things, give yourself $10K more.
Hex editing is way cooler though. I remember using tools that would scan memory for values so you could edit running game values. I used this for flash/browser games (IIRC) and you normally had to enter the current value multiple times for the tool to narrow down to the 1 memory location that held that value (health is 100, Search for 100, get XXXX results, cause health to drop to 95, search for 95, get XX results, rinse and repeat till you got to 1 result, edit that and you can change your health).

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