[microtonal]

Sounds familiar. As a kid I was bothered that I had to harvest spice or Tiberium (I forgot whether it was Dune 2 or Command & Conquer, but I think the latter).

So I figured out where in the binary save file credits were stored and wrote a small Pascal program that would give me the highest possible credits so that I could focus on base and unit building :).

[Pxtl]

Dune 2 before that was similarly hackable. The level definitions were just text files with an encoding that only certain editors would open.