>interested in how games worked, rather than just playing them
I've commented on HN before about the power I think "hackable" games had teaching us how to create on the computer. I have a similar fond memory of heavily tampering with Halo PC via the fan-made Halo Editing Kit, which gave hex access to do all kinds of fun things. Those summer weekends spent changing which side I played on Silent Cartographer were key to me becoming more than "just" a computer user.
One was this Galaga clone for the TRS-80 Color Computer. The CoCo had a couple analog joysticks [1] which were ergonomically horrible. The player would move the joystick left and right to position the on-screen spaceship. The x-position of the joystick would correspond to where the spaceship would be. However, you couldn't just let the player move the joystick quickly from one side of the screen to the other, that would be "unrealistic" video game physics, and from a gameplay perspective, would make it too easy to dodge incoming bullets.
So the ship would move slowly on the screen until it reached the position which corresponded to the joystick position. This was rather annoying and hard to control.
Since I had seen an article to convert a digital joystick (from an Atari 2600) to be used on the CoCo, I also modified the game code to use a more normal control scheme. That involved searching through the disassembled code to find the joystick polling routine, and patch it out with my on version instead. Which, unfortunately, didn't fit, so I had to jump out to a bit of code past the normal end of the program, and then jump back when finished.
I've commented on HN before about the power I think "hackable" games had teaching us how to create on the computer. I have a similar fond memory of heavily tampering with Halo PC via the fan-made Halo Editing Kit, which gave hex access to do all kinds of fun things. Those summer weekends spent changing which side I played on Silent Cartographer were key to me becoming more than "just" a computer user.