Hacking/Cracking/Editing Lego Racers

[Joey]

My younger brothers and younger cousins LOVE the Lego Racers game for the computer. (Lego Racers 1). The only thing is, it is much too easy and it takes very little time to beat it. So I was wondering if there was any way to edit the game to make new levels or something. I haven't seen an editor for it yet. How can I go about in doing this? It doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to edit, but I dont know. You can get the demo at http://www.lego.com/eng/interactive/dow ... TION=Demos

If anyone knows the easiest way possible to edit ANYTHING in the game, please let me know.

[Kon-Tiki]

Use a hex editor on the savegames, looking for the values you want to change. Change the right value and see if it works. Be sure to keep a backup though.

Once you've found the correct value to change, you can write a small C++ program that, when run, it'll change that value automatically for you, so you won't need to use the hex editor on it anymore.

[Eero Ränik]

1) Savegames are usually encrypted, so it is not just "open it in hex editor".
2) Editing or creating maps is quite a hard task. Basically, if you're asking how to edit a game, you probably can't.

[Kon-Tiki]

I've done that with the hex editor several times, only not to Lego Racers ::)

[Joey]

well if you could give me a good hex editor, and perhaps explain to me how to use it and help me a bit, that woudl be great! ;D

[AGI1122]

Joey, don't post so many smilies in 1 post. It kills the topic when you do that.

I modified your post to remove it(I had to do it the hard way and find out the post id, but the topic was unviewable till I fixed it).

[Kon-Tiki]

Joey, hex editors're as easy to use as text editors ::) They're easier found too. Just do a little google, or check a random abandonware site which has applications too (got mine that way... nice'n simple one ) and you'll find tons of them.

[Tim]

'Easy' depends on what you're editing. I find editing English text files easy, but give me a text file in Japanese, and I'd find it very hard.

Same with editing binaries. I wouldn't find it hard to read an EXE file in a hex editor, but if you showed me a Lego Racers saved game file, I wouldn't know where to start.

[Kon-Tiki]

I've done some savegame files from different games. The toughest one was from Darklands. Lots of value matches, but then it's just trial and error (at least, if it's not a hundred matches or so. Then you just have to make the value into another one and compare the changes) I just change one value, go back to the game, load the savegame (praying it'll still load... that's where the backups're for... or a piece of paper with the value's adress on) and see if it has changed the correct value. If it's not, I reset the value and change the next one.

This works most of the time, but I can't say it does all the time. Oh, and sometimes you have to reverse the value or its hexadecimal equivalent. It's just a bit of juggling with it until you got it right.

[Joey]

so wait, hold on. before i do this, i would like to understand what exactly a hex editor is, and what it does. if i edited a .exe file with it, could i compile the file and the game would work according to my changes? i dont know what it does.

[Tim]

A hex editor is like a text editor, exception instead of displaying text:

[tt]Hello[/tt]

...it displays hexadecimal: (and in this case text too)

[tt]00000000 48 65 6c 6c 6f Hello[/tt]

Sure, you can edit an EXE file if you know exactly what you're doing. Here's 16 bytes of code out of an EXE file:

[tt]000008b0 8b 7c 24 18 03 c1 8a 0f 84 c9 8a 10 74 10 3a ca ?|$..??.???.t.[/tt]

[AGI1122]

Ah, good old hex editors, I have one built into Visual C++... I used it when I hacked the AGI interpreter to insert the game id for saved games to use.

Although it can be very complex to do stuff with a hex editor. :-\

[Joey]

well i am going to have absolutely no clue what i am doing. i will give it a shot though. is there a tutorial or something that explains what each number means or something? :-\ i somehow doubt that. and also, what exactly are you doing? you are just editing the game, but it automatically compiles for you? and you CAN edit the .exe? can you edit other files besides .exe?

[Kon-Tiki]

* You can edit any filetype in a hex editor.

* See Tim's example. In a hex editor, it looks exactly like that. Those numbers represent those letters.

* Every self-respecting hex editor has a convertor, which converts between decimal, hexadecimal and binary. You'll be able to find values not mentioned in the list next to it (like those mentioned in previous point) by converting decimal to hexadecimal and searching for that.

[Tim]

By the way, I use HexEdit, which is a small but really polished Windows hex editor.

http://www.catch22.org.uk/software/hexedit.asp

Joey: A hex editor allows you to edit the raw data in a file -- any kind of file. It doesn't try to interpret the data at all (at least a text editor tries to interpret a file's data as text). You will need to know the format of the file you're editing before you can make sense of it.