Trainers
+5 and counting
A trainer is a set of cheats baked into a cracked game — infinite lives, energy, time — usually fronted by a menu, and counted in the cracktro as a badge of effort: '+5'.
Overview
When crackers cracked a game, the better ones didn’t stop at removing the copy protection — they improved it. A trainer is a bundle of cheats patched into the game itself: infinite lives, unlimited energy, frozen timers, level skips. The count became a boast. A crack advertised as “+5” promised five cheats, and the number, displayed proudly in the crack intro, was a measure of how much extra work the group had put in.
For a lot of players, the trainer was the whole appeal — the reason you sought out a particular group’s release over another’s.
How it works
A trainer is memory surgery. The cracker finds where the game stores a value — the lives counter, the energy bar — usually by freezing the machine and searching memory for the number that changes when you take a hit. Replace the instruction that decrements lives with one that does nothing, and lives become infinite. A front-end menu, added before the game starts, lets the player toggle each cheat on or off.
Why it mattered
Trainers turned a crack from a copy into a product with features, and competition over them pushed groups to add ever more (and ever more obscure) cheats. They are also a direct ancestor of the cheat menus, trainer programs, and memory-editing tools that long outlived the cracking scene that invented them.