A command line utility for analysis and certain modifications of Sim City 2000 savegames (*.SC2). Main features:
- universal money cheat
- change city and mayor name
- read city details from file (money, year founded, current game date, …)
- verify file integrity and structure
Sim City 2000 offers no convenient way of changing the name of a city (which is chosen upon starting a new game) or the mayor's name (which is determined at game installation). If you play an existing savegame and/or an abandonware version of the game, you're probably stuck with names that others have chosen. (This is what got me started on this project in the first place.)
Also, most money cheats are clumsy. Available tools (usually DOS or Windows binaries) will usually just give you the maximum possible amount of money ($2,147,483,647), which is uselessly close to where the variable overflows. Other cheats require you to jump through hoops in-game or get down and dirty with a hex editor.
This is where sc2000tool comes in. See this simple example and its effect on the game:
$ sc2000tool -M 50000 -N Awesomeville -Y "Jimbob Johnson" NEWCITY.SC2 -O MYCITY.SC2
You can also analyze files on the command line, like so:
$ sc2000tool --city MYCITY.SC2
City name: Awesomeville
Mayor name: Jimbob Johnson
Year founded: 2000
Current Date: May 23, 3576
Money: $50,000
Other options enable you to examine the file structure and contents down to the byte level.
A stock Python 2.7 should be all that's needed for sc2000tool to run. If you replaced optparse with argparse, you could probably get this requirement down to Python 2.3, but I haven't tried that.
So far, sc2000tool has only been tested on one setup:
- Known working
- Platform: Linux 64-bit with Python 2.7.3
- Sim City 2000: MS-DOS, rev. 1.01
- … running in: DOSBox 0.74
I'd love to see that list grow, especially for Sim City 2000 on other platforms like Mac or Windows. Any report of success or failure is greatly appreciated!
All of sc2000tool's features are listed in its built-in help. Simply call it without any arguments, or explicity with sc2000tool -h or sc2000tool --help.
When in doubt, take a peek at the code. It's scarcely commmented, but hey, at least it's not Perl ;)
I'm immensely interested in whether anybody besides myself will want use this, so I'll be glad to take your questions or comments here, on Twitter or by email.
Most of us wouldn't be able to enjoy all these wonderful old games without the tireless work of the abandonware community. Here, I'd like to thank XTCabandonware especially.
This project would never have gotten off the ground without the work of David Moews, who in 1995 published an in-depth analysis of the .SC2 savegame file structure. Written over 18 years ago, it probably still constitutes the sum of all public knowledge about .SC2 files.