I Hacked 'A Bugs Life' Game - It Was Weird

Let's hack Bugs Life Game

Tools:

💭 All views are my own 💭

[RowenStipe]

Your Application Name Version 2.0 was an absolute banger as a kid!

[wilfridtaylor]

If you are curious about the compatibility stuff in windows you can get your hands on Application Compatibility Toolkit which is shipped as part of the ADK (tool kit for deploying windows in an enterprise environment). It lets you create your own compatability shims and view the existing ones. Can do all kinds of cool stuff like redirecting api calls to file paths or even tell windows to load a old memory manager for specific applications. It also handles those compatability messages that popup to tell you that you can't run certain applications on windows.

[PalliapinbaJuustonen]

cant believe my favorite british comedy is about reverse engineering

[Larry]

You can only have photo sensitive epileptic attacks from CRT screens because of the way it refreshes. And even if you do 100% suffer from them, you only need to have one eye closed or wear an eye patch, as the brain needs to receive signals from both eyes in order to have an attack.

[Cyranek]

it shouldn't have been a surprise to me that a bugs life game had bugs in it

[RobotnikPlays]

From memory, the "two drive" bug existed on a couple of games on the era: I figured that a lot of games just assumed drive D was the disk drive so if you had multiple drives (or something else assigned to D, like a network share) it would just fail.

[soviut]

The PC port of Wipeout XL had an annoying CD requirement (presumably for the music). Fortunately, there was some kind of human readable config file I was able to edit that told it which drive to look at by default. I changed it from D to C and made sure I'd copied the folder structure from the CD onto my hard drive and it worked from then on without the CD.

[LukeAvedon]

The dry British wit reading the manual is golden.

[LordMegatherium]

If this kind of video (probably including a distribution platform like Youtube) had existed 20-30y ago we'd either have DRM way more advanced than Denuvo or the whole concept of copy protection would've been dropped completely because a bunch of kids/teenagers with too much time on their hands would've created a far bigger cracking scene.

These videos just make me giddy because it demystifies the whole concept of cracking and give you enough pointers to start setting your own copy protection ablaze that never had any right to exist. I want 2025 to be the year where a bunch of games from the 90/00s that fell off the wayside are being cracked wide open and are able to reenter our culture at broad.

[R.B.]

The accessibility compatibility issue makes a lot of sense. When I was at Microsoft, I knew that we spent a lot of time patching old applications on the fly, but I hadn't actually seen how it worked before. That was a neat side quest.

[CarlTSpeak]

Legend. Every disassembler should play dialup noises during initial analysis.

Though not for the whole thing given some modern DRM results in initial analysis taking many hours.

[AlubJ]

a Travellers Tale game mentioned, incredible stuff. I actually reverse engineer the file formats that TT have made for their LEGO Games specifically. This was really cool to see!

[DavidSchiess]

the inches not making any sense joke was hilarious! another great video again, I love your reverse engineering format

[Inoculypse]

I loved playing this game when I was left in the Carmax kids play center by myself

[darkstatehk]

If you liked this video, be sure to eax.

[tomysshadow]

It sounds like you could've just made an ISO and mounted it, though I suppose that's less fun (minus the bug where it finds the wrong drive, which might be intentional so it won't find virtual drives.)

Ah yes, the Windows Compatibility Shims. Now you know what happens when you select an old version of Windows in the Compatibility tab in Properties - it just returns a different function for that import! Fun implication of this: GetProcAddress may return an address that isn't actually in the module you passed to it.

[jsimek]

"I am nearly 35 years old and I have kids and I can decompile all the classic games." -- That's a nice humblebrag. Good for you.

[Jackassik]

4:40 I actually had a couple of games like this. In some manuals it was saying that the CD needs to be in the "Master" drive (I'm not sure if anybody else remembers the Master and Slave drives in Windows). I actually had 2 drives for a while, one for CDs that had the burning fuction, and one for DVDs and it was "read-only" one, so that's why I kept 2.

[Stringslinger]

Now I want to play a software product that is NOT connected to a screen.

[faktorial]

I could never finish this game as a kid because the game would never save correctly and my parents only gave me limited computer time every day. Everyday I'd get a little further. I'd speedrun the first levels as quickly as I could just so I could make it to the later levels and make a little more progress before my time was up, knowing that tomorrow I'd have to start back from zero.

Weirdly, as a kid this didn't even bother me too much. I enjoyed the game