This was my first Mod, which I made on my first MSX Computer. I was about 10 years old, and although it was quite silly, it meant a lot to me. Since people always ask me what my first modification was, I’m going to talk about it here.
Well, it all starts small, very small. I was still a kid on the MSX, dreaming of making my own games, with absolutely no one to teach me, or even guide me on how and where to learn.
I started asking my mother to buy MSX Magazines at the newsstands, and although there was very little content about creating the games themselves, every now and then there were some tips on programming on the MSX.
In one article in these magazines, there was talk about some people who translated the MSX-DOS operating system using a Hexadecimal program. There was no information on how it was done or where to get this program, not even a screenshot.
At that time, nothing original was sold here, there were no laws against piracy, and even one of the stores was actually called Microsoft, with the same logo and everything, without having any connection to the original store, which at the time was the only one we knew about here, and it was just another store that sold games and everything related to MSX.
Since everything was simply copied, we used to buy games in groups, we would go with several friends to the stores that sold these games, and we would each agree to buy different games, and then we would record all the games for each other, so each of us would buy about 10 and we would leave with 100 or more.
The first time we went again, I asked for a Hexadecimal Editor, the guy didn’t even know what that was, and he gave me a dirty look, but he went inside to see if they had it, and came back with my floppy disk with the games I had bought, and said he had put the editor on it, without charging anything extra. I was very happy.
When I got home I went to see what a Hexadecimal Editor was, I opened it and saw a bunch of little dots, a place to open files and save and that was it. There was no documentation, and it was 1985, 1986 at the latest, there was no internet, much less YouTubeto look up how to use it, and not even the magazines I had talked about it, and again, I was a child with no instruction regarding computers, everything I knew had been on my own.
Well, I have to try. I picked up one of my favorite games at the time, Konami’s Soccer, and I thought I would learn by changing the names of the teams to Brazilian Clubs, including, of course, my favorite club, Flamengo.
I remember being very nervous, I thought I was doing something wrong, that someone would find out and knock on my door and I would get a big scolding from my mother for modifying the game. At that time, the terms Mod or Modding didn’t even really exist.
I opened the game file and there were a bunch of strange characters on one side and a bunch of numbers and letters on the other. I thought I had something alien in my hands. I looked through all of it and couldn’t identify anything useful there, so I decided to test it to see if what I did would actually work. I changed one of the first characters to something random and saved it. Everything seemed fine, but when I tried to run the game, it wouldn’t run anymore.
That’s great, and the kid here hadn’t backed up the game before modifying it. I lost hours, I even cried desperately thinking that I was going to be arrested for having destroyed the game, but then I managed to remember the original character and make the game work again, and since then I learned this very important lesson, always make a backup before starting to work on anything.
Back to square one, how do I know what I can and can’t edit here? I started studying everything that was in front of me, and way down there I found the names of the teams on the right side, and I saw that there was a relationship with the characters on the left side of the editor, and when I modified them on the left, I changed the characters on the right, and as a layman as I was, I didn’t know that all I had to do was press TABto edit directly on the right side, so I edited directly in Hexadecimal, through trial and error, observing the characters I wanted in other parts and copying the corresponding ones in Hexadecimal, I wrote down all the letters in the notebook so I could change the teams to whatever I wanted. That in itself took days of work.
Okay, now I had the entire alphabet in Hexadecimaland knew where to change it, so the names of the original teams were EAGLES(red) and STONES(blue), so my idea was to change EAGLESto FLAMENGOand STONESto CRUZEIRO, because their uniforms resembled those of these Brazilian Clubs.
After “EAGLES” on the right there were some strange characters, and I thought it would be okay to replace them with the rest of the word “FLAMENGO” which had 8 characters while the original had only 6. I did that, and the game didn’t work anymore, I immediately thought that was it. I went back to my backup and while I was editing, I ended up bumping into the insert, which added more characters in that space, so I could now put the 8 characters right? WRONG! Another crash. Well, I would have to abbreviate this.
So EAGLES became MENGO, and STONES became ZEIRO, and while editing I discovered TAB by accident too, and I felt like an idiot deciphering each letter in Hexadecimal, but that’s okay, another lesson. If what you’re doing is too much work for what it should be, you’re certainly doing something wrong.
As you’ve already noticed, MENGO and ZEIRO have 5characters and not 6 like in the originals, I simply filled them in with spaces. I saved, tested, played, and it worked perfectly. Wow! I was so happy and relieved, but I was still very nervous, it took me months to show this to anyone, I really thought I was doing something very wrong, that I was going to get arrested or something like that. And that was my first experience with Hexadecimal and my First Mod.
Unfortunately I lost this Mod when I copied everything to the PC, many floppy disks no longer worked properly, and unfortunately the modified version was corrupted. I’ve thought about redoing this Mod live on my YouTube channel using a Hexadecimal Editor for PC just to show what it’s like for those who are curious, who knows one day.