Editing hiscore.dat files??

[rwhip41]

Hey...
Has anyone edited hiscore.dat files? Meaning, hacking into a particular high score saved within this utility to manually edit a score and initials?

I ask because I am building a system for a friend. Everyone has a friend like this...sort of an A-hole but not too much of one. This makes it perfect to put my initials in the top score on his favorite games. I mean...unattainable high scores so MY initials will always be there.

His favorite game is Dig Dug (sort of our bragging rights game). The most I've been able to get is a little above 60,000 which is our current record. I'm talking about editing it up to something like 600,000 or something like that.

It looks (to me) that each high score is some sort of a binary file, and I don't know how to get past that.

Any ideas? It would be priceless.

[destructor]

Few years ago I edited this file and it work. DOn't remember details.
Now I use MARP as scoreboard

[Havok]

You can edit with Notepad, (or other text editor) the values are in hexadecimal. Enjoy!

[quarterstringer]

Everyone has a friend like this...sort of an A-hole but not too much of one.

If you want to have some fun with him, you can set attract mode messages in a few Williams games like Joust, Robotron and Sinistar. Hold F1 and hit F2 twice, then go to Set Attract Mode Message. Here's an example 

[rwhip41]

[pinky finger to corner of mouth]
Muahahahahaha!!!

Thanks for the info.

[Lilwolf]

Initially, reading the subject, I couldn't think of a reason anyone would care...

But now, I applaud your idea! 

Make sure to edit the 2nd and 3rd to say something also.  Maybe stating hes your ---smurfette--- or something equally annoying... that he wont notice until hes inviting some friend over and showing the system

[Minwah]

Ah I remember doing this back in the day on a few games on my old Amstrad.  Battlezone sticks in my mind as one...

[rwhip41]

The "heyday" of my computer knowledge was in the DOS 4.0-5.0 "era". This same guy asked me to set up a PC he wanted to put together. I did, as well as an extra surprise. When the PC booted, it would stop somewhere in the boot sequence to display the line, "Walt blows dogs for nickels. Press any key to continue...", and waited until a key was pressed. He didn't like it, but I thought it was hilarious. So he reformatted his hard drive because he didn't know what a batch file was and how to edit one.

[krick]

Ah I remember doing this back in the day on a few games on my old Amstrad.  Battlezone sticks in my mind as one...

I did this to a copy of Tetris that we had on our network in community college.  There was only one copy and everyone shared the high score table.  I hex edited the table and replaced all the scores with unattainable scores and my initials just to piss of my friend who thought he was the Tetris master.

[ahofle]

Resurrecting this old thread....has anyone actually managed to manually edit either the nvram or .hi files successfully?  Recently (probably at some point when upgrading hiscore.dat) my millipede hi scores have stopped saving and the only remedy seem to be deleting the .hi and .nv files (and my previous untouchable scores with them ).  I tried to hex edit both those files to put them back in, but they seem to be in some binary (compressed?) format.  They were also only a few bytes in size. 

[NOP]

I've done it, it just takes some time and trial and errors. 

I got a massive high score on my galaga machine, then fubared the initials entry (put in NOR instead of NOP) and just HAD to fix it.   

The data file is a binary file.  Using notepad on it will more than likely wreck it.
Use a hex editor instead.

Each file is probably different in its layout, because (I believe) this stuff is just dropped into the ROM's memory area when the rom is loaded, so depending on how the game stores the data. 

Before editing the file, wait for the leaderboard to be shown on the screen, then write down the scores and initials for all the entries.  Then hex edit your file. 


Here's the layout of a galaga.hi file:

000000  00 05 08 06 04 01 00 00 06 02 03 01 00 09 01 02  [hex characters here]
000010  09 24 00 00 02 08 06 24 00 09 09 03 06 24 0E 10 
000020  18 17 18 19 17 0A 11 17 0A 22 17 18 19 00 05 08 
000030  06 04 01             


You should be able to find the scores in the file easily enough, in my galaga file, each digit was simply stored as it's own byte in the file, and they were (IIRC) stored backwards and in decimal.  146850 is the current high score, 132600 is the next lowest, etc.
(and no, this 146850 was not the massive high score that I was referring to.  )

The initials were stored after the scores were, and you can kinda make out that the sequence of 17,18,19 is equal to NOP (consecutive letters).

It'll take some time and futzing with, but it is doable.
Just make a backup of the file so you can always undo your mistakes!

-jeff!

[fatfingers]

The numbers were likely backwards because of it being a little-endian machine.  For those that don't know the hex values for ASCII characters by heart, you can find them here.