WHAT YOU WILL NEED

If you want to use this book successfully, you will need the following:

* An understanding of Spectrum BASIC. If you are total beginner, you will almost certainly find this book too complicated, and hence useless to you. If you can understand most of the Spectrum manual, then you should be all right. If you don't understand a word of the section on using +3 DOS in machine code in the +3 manual, don't worry, 'cause I don't either!

* A disassembler or a monitor program. You can, in theory, hack anything without one of these, but in practice, it would be impossible for a beginner, and next to impossible for someone experienced. My personal choice is Hisoft's DEVPAC, but if you have the programs STK and 007 Disassembler (which were on the covertapes of YS #75 and #77), that'll do fine for this book.

* Some games to hack. Obviously business software is out of the window because it's illegal to hack it, and you don't need to anyway. Strategy and adventure games are pretty unlikely to demand a POKE (although it's possible, and I'll show you how I hacked an adventure later on), so you're left with arcade and arcade adventure games. Most of the time you'll want to find infinite lives and/or energy, but there are always exceptions. This book concentrates on games that you're likely to have, which are games which have been on magazine covertapes, or bestsellers.

* Patience and determination. This is the most important thing of all. Finding POKEs is challenging without any knowledge of how the program works, or even a knowledge of the language it's written in! So be prepared to do some serious THINKING!

* A Multiface or other "magic box" device. This is not essential, but it is extremely useful, and a few sections in this book require you to have one (but as few as possible, I might point out!)