Experimenting with hacking Phantasy Star: Generation 1

A few years back I wrote a guide up on GameFAQs about hacking save games for Phantasy Star: Generation 2 on the Playstation 2. I decided I wanted to give Phantasy Star: Generation 1 a whirl since I finally got around to finishing it on the Master System a few years back (via the Phantasy Star Collection Sega Ages release – never finished on the SMS back in the day, it was too hard 😛 Sheer tenacity and the hint book meant I could finish Phantasy Star 2 back in the day though!), but since I’m time-poor I thought I’d kick-start the grind with Alisa/Alis (choose your favourite translation :P). So, I used the experience with the previous save game hacking and applied it to PS:G1 and have had some success.

I’ll actually post up updated tutorials at a later stage for hacking PS:G2 and PS:G1 later on, but if you’re industrious you can apply the theory from my previous FAQ yourself. The only issue I’ve found is that PCSX2 0.9.7 won’t load games, but my old PCSX 0.9.4 works fine; might just be a Windows 7 x64 thing though. Had to add some C libraries to my OS as well (specifically, msvcr71.dll), as MyMC wasn’t working either. I’m using Cheat Engine v6, and it seems to be fine as well.

Just to prove I’m not barking, here’s my game 6 minutes or so in – note the meseta:

And finally, check the Experience and the Level – it’ll take me up to about level 61 after completing my first fight of the game, as that’s how the hacking works:

Anywho, just wanted to share – I’m off to play through the game properly now, not sure if I’ll hack the other characters since Alisa is such a tank now, but probably will down the road 🙂 Well, I probably should since I’ll need the hex values to write up a full guide, like my previous one.

3 Comments

  • Jamey says:

    Hey, i was wondering if people had figured out how to hack this yet. Any chance you could write a hack that could seriously power up the bosses? Like give the Mad Doctor 3 times his hp and more attack. Just to make them more of a challenge? and maybe halve the experience points given in the game except on bosses,(give more for the harder fight maybe twice as much)?

  • Laurent says:

    Please, can you post your save from the beginning of the game ?
    Thx !

  • @Jamey: In theory it would be possible to make those hacks to the game by using the same basic principles in my Gen 2 hacks – use the tools to track the Mad Doctor’s values and then get the software to hex edit them and see how it goes. I’m not sure how to roll out these hex edits into a trainer to load with the game though, I lack the programming skills to do something like that 😉

    @Laurent: Good idea – I’ll look at putting a post together in the future with some clean hacked saves for Gen 1 and Gen 2 since that’s being actively translated now.