[XENNO]

How can you break an SFX archive so that it is damaged, but so that it runs?

[DramaKing]

How can you break an SFX archive so that it is damaged, but so that it runs?

What the what? You could go through the bytecode, find some null bytes, and make changes. Changing any of the program code is going to corrupt it. Depending on where the corrupted code is, it could fail immediately or at some point farther into the execution flow. A program cannot continue when it encounters an exception in anything critical.

You could use a debugger to step through the disassembled code and try to break something that won't automatically cause the extractor to fail, but since an SFX file is meant to run from beginning to end, I wouldn't set expectations high.