If there was a screen that popped up that asked for a word or a code, we removed that whole screen. We did this by reverse engineering the game's code itself. So, yes, we were "reverse-engineering the executable directly". In the early days we were using a debugger called "Soft-Ice" which allowed us to press "CTRL-D" and break into the game at the point where the game was asking for the code. In the later days the game authors had become aware of Soft-Ice, and were putting in countermeasures to stop their game from running if Soft-Ice was loaded. In those cases it came down to "disassemble the code. Study what it does. Make changes." OR! We would make a loader that took over the interrupt timer and watched for a value to change in memory (usually in the case of nasty encryption, the loader would watch for the code to get decrypted, and THEN patch it in memory). There was a Chuck Yeager game that had 3 layers of encryption and checksumming so my loader would patch the first checksumming code, let the code run until the next chunk was decrypted, then patch that code, then let it run until the code was decrypted the LAST time, at which point I would patch out the doc check. (word, or "Identify this plane". Something like that). Feel free to ask any questions! I'll answer anything! There's a lot of historical data here: http://fabulousfurlough.blogspot.com/

You said: "For these guys, the focus wasn't necessarily direct financial profit, but rather the technical challenge and a certain philosophy that computer knowledge should be accessible to everyone." Not exactly! I certainly enjoyed the technical challenge, but we at THG were in it to be first. We spent lots of money on expedited shipping and other "tricks" to get the games first so that we could RELEASE them first and "win" for that particular game. We were SOLELY about the competition. I was a co-founder of THG and the original cracker in the group and I played VERY VERY few games that we released. I would play it only long enough to make sure the crack worked, or long enough to develop a trainer, but that was usually it. I didn't keep them even. Once a game was done, cracked, uploaded to Candyland BBS, I would erase it from my hard disk. In the Manuals and Tables section you said: "Crackers solved this by distributing simple text files containing all possible answers.". No, crackers solved this by modifying the code to believe that a correct answer had been entered. And as was the case with THG, you never knew the game was asking you for a word or code. We removed ALL of that. The same with bad sector checks, or dongles. IIRC there were no PC games that used dongles. Those were usually used on applications like 3D Studio, or other expensive packages as the dongles were too expensive to be included with a $30 game.