DOS C&C Savegame decoding

[Iran]

Why do those savegame format maps only work with DOS?

[Nyerguds]

Because they apparently completely revised the internal data storage in the heaps in C&C95, making the mem dumps incompatible.

[Iran]

Shame, need someone who knows how to patch DOS games to dump savegames into map files.

[Prometheus]

i remember an old map editor for DOS which let you open SAV files. maybe you could use something like that to extract at least the BIN? and then maybe re-construct the INI by different clues...

 

but maybe my memory is wrong, it was a long time ago.

[Nyerguds]

Never heard of any such map editor. I've seen DOS savegame editors, and a DOS scenario editor which used its own data file which you needed to explicitly extract the ini and bin from with additional tools, but I've never seen a map editor that can open SAV files.

 

And I collect old C&C tools, so I doubt I'd have missed it. There aren't THAT many map editors.

[Prometheus]

okay, then i think i remembered wrong. if such a thing existed i would have thought you'd know about it

[Iran]

I added a hotkey to generate a map file from the map/mission you're currently playing, with everything in/on the map like units and triggers. It's for RA95. It was simple to do and someone who has the ability to patch DOS C&C1 should contact me, so we can extract the mission from the savegame.

 

Otherwise it should be possible to extract the map file by running a decoder for the algorithmn used to encode the map files and other stuff, but I don't know the aglorthm used. I do know the name of the class/functions responsible for encoding/decoding.

[Chimas]

This is getting interesting again ...

Someone that might wanna take a look on that is Pichorra. I'll PM him ...

[Nyerguds]

Problem with DOS C&C remains that you need a place to dump the new code... then again, for that purpose, I doubt anyone would care if something like the LAN lobby UI code in the game was removed.

 

Biggest problem with DOS C&C is that when I last messed with it, the game mysteriously locked up on some simple edits, while others worked perfectly.

[Iran]

A hotkey should work or immediately after loading the savegame.

[pichorra]

Interesting... How did you got the triggers from the game? I know that the binary is in some sort of a array ingame. Loading an map and scanning the memory confirms that. But I can't look into it because i'm busy with something else, and I probably won't until January

As for implementing in DOS C&C: Dunno.

[Iran]

When it reads everything from the map it loads it in memory. Every function to read part of the map file (say the [Trigs] section) has an equivalent function to write the triggers in memory back into a map file. It's for the built-in map editor they used.

 

Here's the code I'm using, there's loading an INI file, writing [basic] section keywords manually, calling functions to write back every other part of the map back into the loaded INI and saving the INI:

 

https://github.com/cnc-patch/ra303p/blob/master/src/map_snapshot.asm

 

Every cell of the map is part of the CellClass array inside MapClass.

[Chimas]

Tore, can you move this discussion and the last posts to a proper place?

[Nyerguds]

Split and moved. Not sure if this is the correct place for it, though.

 

Note to Tore: something seems to go wrong with the "&" character in the split topic function 

[Allen262]

oops wrong place to post...