08 Sep 2021
Flappy Mac Hack
Flappy Mac, if you haven’t seen, is a Flappy Bird style game for the classic Macintosh created by Killgruz aka Jarrod Ford.
I am a horrible Flappy player, but an avid tinkerer. I decided to poke around and see if I could cheat and unlock all 10 characters without actually getting 100 flaps.
Finding the Score
Poking around any classic Mac program you start up ResEdit and poke around to see what you can find. I wrote about some fond memories back in 2011 - “cracking” the Decent app so I didn’t need to use the original CD and could listen to some Weezer or NIN instead.
Flappy Mac opened in ResEdit.
Once you open Flappy Mac in ResEdit you’re greeted with a list of resources - things that make up dialogs, windows, game data, and code for the game. The trick here is to find the resource that stored the score. I played till I got a score of 6 and started looking for a 6 somewhere in there…
The DATA forks are the most likely places for this to be stored, but it could be obfuscated or stored in some odd encoding. Luckily it was quite easy to spot SDAT (Save Data?) and I put the hex equivalent of 100 (0x0064) and low and behold I had a score of 100!
Flappy Mac ResEdit score to 100!
Creating the Patch
Being an avid Mac user in the 90’s I used my fair share of patches and hacks, but had never created one. I went looking at different cracks and patches till I found an app I’d forgotten - ResCompare!
ResCompare 2.6 Folder/Icon
ResCompare allows you to take 2 files and compare resource differences between them:
Comparing the original and the 100 flaps version.
After that you can create a executable patch file to share with others to patch the game without diving into ResEdit:
A familiar patch icon to anyone in the mid 90’s
Thanks and Download
Huge shout out to KillGruz for the Flappy Mac game, the permission to post this trainer, and the ride down nostalgia lane. If you’d like to download the patch file and become a no good cheater, click below:
Cheater!
Another Option
I also checked out the much newer (2020) ResPatch and was able to create a patch which I included in the archive as well.
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