When a game is running that was started by dragging it to Desktop Hacker, you can interrupt it at any point by holding down both Alt keys, either side of the space bar. Desktop Hacker will return to the desktop immediately, and open the disassembler and register windows ready for you to find cheats. You can use the desktop and any applications without affecting the game, though Desktop Hacker turns the sound system off to avoid crashes with certain games' music systems.
To go back to the game where you left off:
It is possible to quit the game from the desktop, but as with pressing Alt-Break during the game on the Risc PC, this isn't guaranteed to work perfectly if at all; it depends on the game. To try to quit the game without its permission, choose 'Kill game' from the disassembler menu.
Sometimes games don't allow you to interrupt them. These are a few of the reasons this can happen:
Sometimes the program you get when you run the game application is not
the game itself, but another program which itself launches the game. If
the launcher program starts the game directly Desktop Hacker will
detect this and you can do something about it (see
Forking), but if the game is started by a
command like *Filer_Run
you'll have to open the game and
look at the !Run file in a text editor to see what it runs. If it
contains a line like:
Filer_Run <Obey$Dir>.!Run2
then you should drag the !Run2 file inside the game to the icon bar icon instead of the game itself.
It is possible to change the key combination used to activate Desktop Hacker. Users of the Acorn A4 in particular will need to change it since the A4 only has one Alt key.
Choose 'Choices...' from the icon bar menu and click on the Change button to change the hot-key combination. Hold down the combination of keys you want to use to activate Desktop Hacker; up to four keys can be used together.
All the options on this window, including the hot-key settings, may be put into action by clicking on 'OK' or saved to disc to be used every time Desktop Hacker is loaded by clicking on 'Save'.
Forking
Starting a game
Running Desktop Hacker