document updated 15 years ago, on Jan 27, 2009

There seem to be numerous copies of the manual scattered about online.

The Game Maker website has numerous discussions on it about how easy it is to crack (to get a "free" Pro version):

If you see this bug though, note that it's associated with cracking. Just restart and it will go away.

for GM7, the debug-mode enabler simply modifies the .exe, and writes a "1" at offset 1980009. (it's normally a "0")
- You can confirm this by just starting a game with the Debug Mode Enabler, and while the game is running, copy the .exe to another place. Then close the game (which makes Debug Mode Enabler restore the .exe to the original version), and then run your second copy of the .exe. It will now ALWAYS open up in debug mode. Binary-diff the two, and you see the one change.
generated .exe's are not compiled, they more or less include the .gmk
GM7 decompiles .gex files all by itself
once the Debug Mode thing worked, they were able to use script_get_text() to get the text of specific scripts
this is not how the decompiler works though. The decompiler reads the whole thing into memory.