Comment by hcrisp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hcrisp | Hacker News Reader

A crazy memory I have with this game is related to its successor, Championship Lode Runner (mentioned in the article). The original allowed you to jump to any level through its title screen, so you could skip hard levels, or play them in any order you want. The Championship game, however, had 50 levels that you could only play through in order, and only after you had beaten the prior level. As my brother and I got stuck in one of of the lower levels, this was very frustrating since we had no way of enjoying the higher, more advanced levels.

Somewhere along the line, we figured out that you could start the original game, go to the level-jumping screen, remove the 5 1/4" original floppy disc and replace it with the one for the Championship game, and then enter the level you wanted to play. The original gameplay would load the Championship level as if nothing was out of the ordinary! I only think this was possible because the two games shared so much code structure. It gave me an idea of how the memory vs disc model of the game was operating. But I don't think it would be easy to do today since switching the floppy discs was so instrumental to making it work. Maybe today you could do kernel dumps or swap the in-memory vs disk binaries, but we were just kids not advanced computer wizards. Hurray for analog hacks!

By using the trick we were able to enjoy all 50 of the Championship levels at our leisure.

In the Apple II game "Below The Root", was a side-scrolling RPG kind of like early Zelda games, and you could use the floppy drive to wall-hack.

Every time you walked from one screen to another, it would load the new screen from disk. If you removed the disk from the drive before walking to a new screen, it would grind the empty drive for a while, but eventually it would just use the old screen layout for the new screen but still "think" you were in the new tile.

So lets say you had 3 screens 1-2-3 and '2' has an obstacle but '1' does not. You could:

1) walk to the right hand edge of screen 1

2) remove the floppy

3) cross to screen 2 - this would appear to reset you to the left side of screen 1

4) put the floppy back in

5) walk to right side of the "fake" screen 1 and cross to the next screen again

6) presto - you're now on screen 3! Obstacle avoided!

And you could repeat step (3) multiple times to teleport across an arbitrary # of screens.

8 y.o. me was super proud to figure that out :)

Floppies were magic for me as a kid. Somehow way cooler than an Atari 2600 cart. My uncle had some variant of the Apple II in his basement. One night while the adults were visiting, I was down there excitedly playing the various games (The Dark Crystal, Loderunner, and Olympic Decathlon are the ones that come immediately to mind). I'd take one game out of the driver, drop it on the desk, and insert the next game. By the end of the night there was a sloppy pile of floppies that had previously been individual sheathed in a nice 'rolodex'. My parents called down and when I tried to spend the time to clean up my mess they made it pretty clear I needed to be up there 'right now'. So I foolishly left the pile rather than face my parents' wrath. I'm sure my uncle was furious when he found the pile; those things were fragile and I had treated them like they were Duplo. The next time I was at my uncle's house I wasn't allowed to play. :(

For floppy swapping madness, Wasteland is the game that comes to mind for me. The game was split across two floppy disks, each covering roughly half of the map. When you'd enter a section that was on the other disk, the game would ask you to swap disks. The game state was saved on the disk on which the action occurred, so you could enter an unaltered world just by putting in a fresh copy of the game disk. This was useful for continuing to play after you'd beaten the game, as well as leveling up your characters to extreme levels and collecting multiple copies of rare or hard-to-get items.

Swap disk trick for the PlayStation 2:

Find a game disk that was a demo (like from a magazine). It must have a main ELF, that would then launch another ELF from the disk. (For example, the main menu would be one ELF, and then each demo game would be another elf). Create an iso, then replace one of the game ELFs with whatever executable you wanted. The resulting iso must have the same layout, with every file at the same location. Burn it to disk. Tear apart the PS2 and remove the top of the disk drive. There's a little white plastic piece with a magnet that clamps down the disk, remove that from the lid of the disk drive. Put the original disk in the drive, clamp down the disk with the magnet, and boot it up to the menu screen of the demo disk. Without hitting the eject button, use your finger to stop the drive, lift out the original disk, set in your burned one, put the magnet on top, and choose to run the game that corresponds to the ELF you replaced. Voila.

You reminded me of a similar bug we exploited for "Bards Tale 3" on the C64. Bards Tale had a character loader that would prompt you to insert your character disk to load characters from. It turns out that using other non Bards Tale disks (i.e. "Batman: The Movie") would yield corrupted characters, some with excess hit points or unusual items which could be given to your existing characters.

I used a hex editor to hack my BT1 save disk to give my characters XP and gold. I miscalculated or mis-converted the XP, and my characters all wound up around level 900. I would leave a weight on the key to "interview" at the school to advance a level, and watch TV for 20 minutes while they all leveled up.

I had a real story with hacking the Centauri Alliance save disk, which had a bit more obfuscation. I figure there's about 3 people who care, and they're all going to see this HN thread, so: https://davidkrider.com/hacking-centauri-aliance/

I mean, to this day you can level stealth in Skyrim by standing in the right spot, crouching and holding down move forward.

I sent away and got the certificate for successfully completing Championship Lode Runner!

It was the first game I got with my Apple //c. Had never even played the original.

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