this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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No, this was via debug, a command that's been included in MS-DOS since like version 2.0 (before there even was a Windows, much less full-OS windows like Win95/NT/etc rather than 3.0/3.1 that were just fancy launchers that sat on top of DOS.) It can let you view and alter the contents of memory at a particular address, etc. We also used it to wipe hard drives by forcibly writing 0s to every block on the drive.
You could do stuff like that with the older DOS versions of Norton Utilities. I used to do fun stuff like set my friend's files as the drive label. He thought I was basically a wizard.
Yup, or any hex editor that could target memory addresses (some of them were limited to run on a certain file or whatever.) But yeah I used to do similar when I was a kid, I would go into my game files (all DOS games back then of course) and change text strings you could find in there with a hex editor. I'd just change goofy stuff like 'Copyright' to 'Copyleft', 'The bandit strikes the princess!' to 'The dude slaps a ho', etc. It was endlessly amusing when I was that age. :)