Dirty Coding Tricks

Caught this on Hacker News:

Gamasutra - Dirty Coding Tricks

Hacker News discussion

Nine real-world stories of the horrible hacks that games programmers had to use in order to meet their deadlines. Here's one from the comments on the page by Ken Demarest:

Back on Wing Commander 1 we were getting an exception from our EMM386 memory manager when we exited the game. We'd clear the screen and a single line would print out, something like "EMM386 Memory manager error. Blah blah blah." We had to ship ASAP. So I hex edited the error in the memory manager itself to read "Thank you for playing Wing Commander."