Yeah one great thing about the TP's inline assembler was that you could write the first draft of for example a TSR program in Pascal and then translate it piecemeal into assembly until you could ditch the compiler completely and just use the TASM.
Yup, that was my experience - otherwise you end up paying some kb of runtime attached. - One of my TSR was to transform the 320x200x256 buffer from one game into hercules (640x200) mono (1bit) mode. For the Trolls game - it was super slow, but worked, and it was more enjoyable making the hack, than playing it.
Another cool feature (back then) was this TSR which would let you save the state of the RAM running, and then save again and again, and by doing diffing you can find where certain game would keep life points, etc.
Lol, I did something similar. Not saving the whole RAM, but I made a TSR to first scan memory for an integer, which would create a list of all hits. I could then rescan as soon as the number changed (your character's hp for example), and it would just filter down the list from the first scan. Repeat until you're down to one hit, and you've got your candidate for a write operation! Actually worked on a couple of games... =)
Yup - it was also fun to find that some games were keeping the HP points as text - there was at least one, involving a ninja (but can't remember the name of the game).
Oh, and that tool was someone else that wrote it, not me. But was quite popular in the PC clubs I was going to.
One particular application was for the resident-style apps (like keyboard locale switchers, or process killers of sorts (e.g. kill anything that started after me), etc.). But also INT 21H, and others.
