Regarding the Cheats & Hints.
well I haven't been able to mod an existing game, unfortunetly however u CAN mod theequipment you start with on a new game, to do tat you have to modify some of the core game files, so take copies of them.
Ok now go into the program folder of the game and you should see a bunch of folders, theese folders contain information about the game itself, ok now to modify a new game scroll down until you find the folder named character and open the character init file in wordpad os something like it, then scroll down until you find either beatriss or blaze stats, you sill find for example gold, weapons and spyglass equipped there, and also the ship you start with
Now for starters you can grab yourself some hard earned experience, find the line marked experience and set it to 99999999 should send you straight to level 150 the first time you get EXP, then you can do the same for gold, be greedy cuss if you choose to start with the Manowar you will have a full crew to deal with
now then you could modify your stats but seeing as to how your gonna be level 150 or round there anyway I don't see the point, next up is weapon change it from blade1 to blade18, in effect the best sword in the game, change gun1 to gun7 for the same effect, and change spyglass1 to spyglass4, spyglass4 isn't a unique item but spyglass5 is a telescope and only good for looking at the stars, ok now that that's all done there is only 1 thing remaining namely changing the shihp into something worthy of a great pirate, so were gonna change SHIP_LUGGER into SHIP_MANOWAR, it's imortant that they are written in capital letters, also you can increase the cargohold size by modifying the sip data in the ships folder, but I'll leave that to your own discresion, I would not put it above the store capacity of a store, as that might be the maximum that's intended for the game, I set mine to 9k, the file is ships init... i think if not justcheck the other files, oh and before you go berserk in the ships folder keep in mind that your ship isn't the only one being changed all ships of the same type are affected