PSIV Save hacking

[Relief]

Hey all, I have not been around for years now, I was here back when the message board was integrated into pscave before the admin took a bit of a break for a few years... anyhow, I'm back (i doubt anyone would remember me though)

Well I am working on a PSIV hack tool that functions with Gens Emulator (the best in my opinion) and I have run across a bit of an oddity and gives me a bit of hope for creating a possible save edit that will force alys into your group... but I have hit a bit of a wall.

Here is the save that I have edited:
http://www.fire-fish.net/MISC/Others/Ph ... %20IV%20(4)%20%5B!%5D.srm

What I have done is edited the part and event so that alys is still waiting for you to talk to her at the start of the game, but she is now in your group. You can walk around with her in your part and her stats show up and she can talk to people. If you go back and talk to alys she will join your group (see what im getting at) and the story will continue. the issue with not talking to her is that the event to progress the story does not seem to be triggered and you cannot continue in the story untill you talk to her... I have attempted changing what seems to be the event indicator in the save, with no avail. But take a look at what I have done, at the least its promising and a bit lucky that i stumbled upon that.

The PS IV saves are put together in a really odd manner and I am having issues figuring out which elements are which, per example I can find what seems to clearly be the item list, but when editing it the game no longer recognizes the save and forces a fresh start (if anything is out of order the game will not recognize the save). So I must be changing only part of the menu system and missing another, like if there is a indicator for the item, and then an item count...

I was wondering if anyone knows much about this and could point me in the right direction.

Hopefully after some time working on this I can start working on a program that is windows based and user friendly that can edit most anything you want in you save (items, money, exp, stats, characters in group, etc)

- Relief

[Zucca]

An editor would be even more cooler, but I think it's too much to ask.

[Semix]

How do you actually hack?
Could you do it on sega mega drive ultimate collection for PS3.
And what is this "action replay"
Please don't laugh...

[thriwren]

How do you actually hack?
Could you do it on sega mega drive ultimate collection for PS3.
And what is this "action replay"
Please don't laugh...

Action replay is a device that hooks up the the system in the gmae slot and if needed a memory port that alows a person to put in hex code to make the game a bit waser to bet in ways of max wepons and bullets, infinit live or energy, etc. Also, it is very similar to game genie if you are familiar to you.

[Muuu teKi]

On the PS3 collection? It would likely be hard because you can't actually take savestate images, and messing with the save-files doesn't seem to be as well-documented. It might not even be possible to transfer them to, say, a converter in the first place.

The Action Replay is really a memory patcher. Pretty much all character stats have to be stored in the Genesis main RAM since they change over time (the main game programming is ROM -- that is, read-only memory) and need to be accessed quickly and efficiently. By using a device like the Pro Action Replay you can edit these values in memory, so instead of Chaz being at level 32 with 25 HP he can be at level 13 with 567 HP by overwriting the memory locations that data is stored in.

You're actually editing the wrong thing -- you want a save state to edit, not the game's saved memory. A save state is a dump of everything in the Genesis RAM at that point in time, which can then be edited with external tools like a hex editor such as frhed or XVI32. Editing those values then is basically what the action replay does, in what amounts to a very similar manner.

Basically, using Gens+ you're going to want to press F5 and open up the file that's produced by doing so. It'd probably be a .gs0 file in a directory called "saves".

Incidentally, Fusion is better than Gens+, though I'm saying this having initially preferred the Gens+ interface. It's certainly more accurate, though super-exact timing and interrupt emulation isn't usually an issue for RPGs. (The sound quality is significantly better, or, at least, more accurate in Fusion.)

[thriwren]

Incidentally, Fusion is better than Gens+, though I'm saying this having initially preferred the Gens+ interface. It's certainly more accurate, though super-exact timing and interrupt emulation isn't usually an issue for RPGs. (The sound quality is significantly better, or, at least, more accurate in Fusion.)

Myself I prefer Kega over Gens, But this are the best two Sega emulators that I have seen.