Imagesource: http://www.jaruzel.com/

Little Computer People was a technically groundbreaking simulation game developed and published by Activision back in 1985. It was about interacting with a small virtual person living in a computerized house, who could be communicated with via typed commands. The game probably laid the foundation for later virtual life and pet games and, as history has it, acted as an ideation blueprint for the mega hit The Sims.

That was apparently enough motivation for Matt Owen aka @MattOwen_UK, to dedicate himself to the Amiga version of the game, and to hack it open.

Matt turned his attention to the game's data files, and with manual brute force, he identified some of the fundamental parameters of the LCP. But since POKEing of values in DMA systems is considered hacking, it can certainly be allowed to use this precious term in this case as well.

What's cool is that Matt has written a tool to adjust a quite a bit of the configuration options, that allows the game to be manipulated in real time. This way, you can kick out the current LCP and let a new one move in, configure your own LCP yourself, reset the personality, and reset the health status.

Matt has documented his path in detail here, and it's fun to read.

All in all, it's a nice exercise and a successful tool, which by the way also runs smoothly in the various UAE variants.