Hacker News Reader

Comment by doomlaser | Hacker News Reader

ResEdit was a cool tool. I especially liked its built-in pixel editor. I remember my first "hacking" experiences as a kid replacing sprites in Ambrosia Software games.

Tangent: there was a more feature-packed resource fork editor called Resorcerer, which I thought was clever and used as naming inspiration for my system-wide cursor hider tool, Cursorcerer: http://doomlaser.com/cursorcerer

View on HN

Same, the Escape Velocity games (and my desire to mod them) were some of my earliest introductions to "hacking" or "programming" and getting an understanding of how things actually worked on a computer. There is a Kickstarter for a Remaster of EV: Override, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-f...

And one of the more interesting parts of that, Cosmic Frontier is aiming for data file and plugin compatibility with the old resource fork files (alongside an updated format for anyone making new plugins).

There's a blog post from last year (before it was kickstarted) discussing some of the file format stuff:

https://opennova.blog/2019/09/23/plugin-plans-in-kestrel/

You can follow along with that part of the project here: https://github.com/TheDiamondProject/Graphite

Looks like the whole game engine is on github: https://github.com/EvocationGames/KestrelEngine

>I remember my first "hacking" experiences as a kid replacing sprites in Ambrosia Software games.

Similar story here. I tweaked just about everything ResEdit could open and show graphical resources for. Netscape, IE, PangeaSoft games, random shareware games, the system itself, you name it.

Seeing my edits in "live" software was a blast. It inspired a certain curiosity and made a little bit of how software works click in my head much earlier on than it would have otherwise.

Maybe you saw this back then https://spacejam.com/cmp/souvenirs/iconsframes.html

EV was also my intro to hacking.

I'm considering teaching a "intro to hacking -- by way of game mods" course at my hackerspace some day using Endless Sky or NAEV.

I LOVED Ambrosia games! I used ResEdit for modifying EV games to my will. Then I had the pleasure of interning there. Greatest thing I ever did. That crew is nothing but amazing people!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com