Back in the day
This page is all about my saved game editors that I created on the Atari ST. This was something I was well known for back in the day, along with music ripping and creating the Professional Virus Killer for Floppyshop.
Slowly but surely I will be revisiting them all (some of the first are now, in 2019, 30 years old!) and recompiling them using the latest version of GFA BASIC. The original editors were coded using either GFA v2 or GFA v3.
In the old days, it got to a point where it would only take me an evening to take the code ‘shell’ from the last saved game editor that I had made and turn it around to work for another game.
I wouldn’t need to change much, especially for editors that were only looking at a few bytes in the saved game’s file(s).
I’d change the GFA code to: check the file size of the saved game, on-screen text, what PEEKs and POKEs were needed and then, before the full program was issued, insert a new tune that I had hacked from a recent game / demo.
It would be nice to get back to that kind of productivity, but rearranged for my older (and occasionally wiser) self; maybe one a month, or more than likely, a few every year.
New GFA
Lonny Pursell, has been upgrading the original v3 code and improving it / bug-fixing it and there’s a new beta version available (v3.72) from his site (http://gfabasic.net/) and that’s the version I will be using.
This enhanced version includes lots of extra commands for the “modern day” Atari ST / Falcon coder that uses GFA BASIC.
Current status
My first new saved game editor in a loooong time (2018) was for ‘Legend Of The Sword’. It is near enough complete but I just never got around to releasing it. The full source code is available on this page.
After installing EasyAraMint in May 2022, and some tweaking of code, I’ve started converting my really old routines into simple GEM-based programs. No music or anything any more, just good old .RSC tweaks. My code “engine” makes it fairly easy to convert an older cheat editor, into the new style. Then recompile it using GBE.
Once the above one has been sorted out and released, then I can start back-tracking through all of my older editors and bring them up to date. The plan is that this year (2022), I’ll be releasing as many as I can in a 30th-ish Anniversary set, at the Silly Convention in Gdansk (Poland) at their Summer event.
List of saved game hack utils:
Note: There could be others that were part developed and never released too, so they will be revisited and released as well as, where possible, extra hacks added in to them.