Posted August 21, 2015
I see in the package that these games say they include code wheels, where the Dethek must line up with the Elven (or something) so that you can get a letter to punch in to save your game. You get three 'guesses' or 'chances'. How are these implemented in the bonus goodies.
[code wheel spoiler]
: These games are packed with EXE-Pack, IIRC. If you unpack the game exe, you can find a bunch of interesting string formations in the bottom of the file. It looks like $01234567$89ABCDEF$...$ and so on. They appear to match up with the code wheel inner ring of characters. If one were to change those values to say, 'S', it could make answering that question very easy. I found out about EXE packing, overlays and so on because I used to use LZEXE to pack my EXEs to fit more items on a disk. If I'd learned assembly language, I might've been able to patch the check out altogether.
Now, this was the original 1.0 EXE that was came in the gold box on the 360k floppy. If the EXE's been repacked with some other EXE compressor and cannot be restored, then
[save hacking spoiler]
Oh, and if you are interested in your Save0.dat (I think that's right), strings are 1 indexed with the first bit denoting the length of the string, so it is possible to change the name of your character after creation, up to 9 or so characters in length. I'm told that this format is unique to Pascal and Assembly Language, because it limits your string length to 255.
[gameplay exploit spoiler]
Also, there's was an item dupe bug, in that you could load a character, loot them, kick them out of the party - saving them with a different name (say X), load the original character again, loot the items, repeating as necessary. Needless to say, if everyone one has on Dust of Disappearance, some battles become remarkably easy - especially if you wait for the dragons, beholders, rakshasha (etc) to move first, then you run around and backstab them (yeah, not supposed to be able to backstab beholders, I know), and you disappear before the next round. Lots of fun! Yes, it was fun to see those battles you weren't supposed to fight (much less win).
[code wheel spoiler]
: These games are packed with EXE-Pack, IIRC. If you unpack the game exe, you can find a bunch of interesting string formations in the bottom of the file. It looks like $01234567$89ABCDEF$...$ and so on. They appear to match up with the code wheel inner ring of characters. If one were to change those values to say, 'S', it could make answering that question very easy. I found out about EXE packing, overlays and so on because I used to use LZEXE to pack my EXEs to fit more items on a disk. If I'd learned assembly language, I might've been able to patch the check out altogether.
Now, this was the original 1.0 EXE that was came in the gold box on the 360k floppy. If the EXE's been repacked with some other EXE compressor and cannot be restored, then
[save hacking spoiler]
Oh, and if you are interested in your Save0.dat (I think that's right), strings are 1 indexed with the first bit denoting the length of the string, so it is possible to change the name of your character after creation, up to 9 or so characters in length. I'm told that this format is unique to Pascal and Assembly Language, because it limits your string length to 255.
[gameplay exploit spoiler]
Also, there's was an item dupe bug, in that you could load a character, loot them, kick them out of the party - saving them with a different name (say X), load the original character again, loot the items, repeating as necessary. Needless to say, if everyone one has on Dust of Disappearance, some battles become remarkably easy - especially if you wait for the dragons, beholders, rakshasha (etc) to move first, then you run around and backstab them (yeah, not supposed to be able to backstab beholders, I know), and you disappear before the next round. Lots of fun! Yes, it was fun to see those battles you weren't supposed to fight (much less win).