Not related to Macs but coincidentally StarCraft was also the first time ever I "cracked" a game. ^^
For whatever reason, the copy protection was not recognizing my game disc (apparently only worked on Windows 95 but not 98 as I found later).
This was my most anticipated game yet, so I made myself learn Windows/PC debugging on the spot — without the internet — which basically amounted to single-stepping through every line of disassembly in Visual Studio until the disc error message, then working backwards from the very last "jump" instruction, flipping the condition of each jump (I think it was JZ to JNZ or vice versa), until finally I found the 2 bytes (or was it 4) that took me to the blessed menu music that I can still recall. :)
Of course I had nobody to show my achievement off to and it wasn't even a moment of pride or anything, just relief and sheer happiness as I was about to get lost in what would become one of my most favorite games of all time.
(P.S. I hate what they did to the story in StarCraft II)
Impressive! Broken video games motivate a lot of learning.
When I was a teenager, we had three game-capable PCs, but only two had LAN cards. I also had an underpowered LAN-connected Linux machine. I connected the non-LAN PC to the Linux box with a parallel cable. Linux could route packets between the LAN and parallel-cable network. But DOS games find each other with local broadcasts which don't forward. No game had a function to specify a network address to connect to. I needed to bridge the networks. Linux could bridge ethernet, but the parallel network wasn't ethernet. So I copied the source of a kernel module and modified it to bridge IPX packets between the LAN network and the parallel-cable network.
It worked! My friends and I could play THREE-PLAYER games! DN3D, C&C Red Alert, Quake, Descent, Terminal Velocity, etc. Network drive sharing even worked. It was glorious.
For whatever reason, the copy protection was not recognizing my game disc (apparently only worked on Windows 95 but not 98 as I found later).
This was my most anticipated game yet, so I made myself learn Windows/PC debugging on the spot — without the internet — which basically amounted to single-stepping through every line of disassembly in Visual Studio until the disc error message, then working backwards from the very last "jump" instruction, flipping the condition of each jump (I think it was JZ to JNZ or vice versa), until finally I found the 2 bytes (or was it 4) that took me to the blessed menu music that I can still recall. :)
Of course I had nobody to show my achievement off to and it wasn't even a moment of pride or anything, just relief and sheer happiness as I was about to get lost in what would become one of my most favorite games of all time.
(P.S. I hate what they did to the story in StarCraft II)