HOPE 2020 (2020): "Boot Genie: Hacking and Cheating at Boot Sector Games" (Download)

Saturday, July 25, 2020: 1700. Despite legacy BIOS going away, the boot sector gaming scene is on the rise. These are x86 16-bit games intended to fit inside the 512 byte MBR (Master Boot Record) space. Despite these limits, you'll find playable clones of games like PacMan, Invaders, Arkanoid, Flappy Bird, Snake/Nibbles, a rogue-like dungeon crawler, Tetris, a ray-casting 3D game, some more independent titles, and new ones are still in the works. However, this won't be a history or overview of this interactive demoscene-adjacent playground. It's the more meta playground of gaming the games - hacking and cheating at them. Though this talk will dive into the technical details of hacking the games, a showcase of a collection of patch files (aka Boot Genie) will be shown and demonstrated. These patches include cheats such as invincibility, more lives, speed slowdowns, score hacks, rule/logic hacks, multiplier mods, better powerups, level mods, and more. Beyond cheat patches, another showca