Blast Corps Save editor

The GitHub repository and downloads can be accessed here.

My very first real program was a save game editor for a game you may have never heard of: Blast Corps, an action puzzle game created by the legendary developers at Rareware. I played it a lot when I was a young kid and messed around with cheat codes and the RAM of that game. Frankly, the controls and graphics of this game did not age well, but the kick-ass soundtrack and fun levels still make me revisit the game occasionally. The first version of this tool was developed in late 2016 and... wow, it was really bad code. Regardless, it was decent enough to edit save files.

Blast Corps uses 512 bytes of EEPROM to store progress. I found it hard to believe that these few bytes could store all the information like the player's name, unlocked levels, clear times for all the levels and more. I was able to figure out the format by inspecting value changes whenever I progressed during my playthroughs. However, there was a big problem for me to grasp... checksum values. Such numbers are used to verify the integrity of stored save data. In other words, an invalid checksum makes the game interpret the data as corrupted and the player is forced to create a new save file. Huge thanks to queueRAM who reverse-engineered the game's checksum algorithm.

In Autumn 2020, I reviewed my old code and decided to rewrite the entire tool from scratch. This was quite fun because I could directly check how my coding skills have improved over the years. It may be a simple save editor, but this program will always have a special meaning for me since it was my very first proper programming project.