SV1Codec

SV1Codec is a program to manipulate Transport Tycoon savegame and scenario files. Copyright is © 2002-2003 by Marcin Grzegorczyk.

This program is distributed according to the terms of the Open Source MIT License. For more information, read the file sv1codec.txt in the distribution archive.

Features of SV1Codec include:

• Decompression of savegame files into raw data files (also known as 'big' files) suitable for editing with any hex editor.
• Compression of the 'big' files back into playable savegame files.
• Correction of the file checksum in savegame files (very useful in transferring savegames from the Windows version of Transport Tycoon Deluxe to the DOS version).
• Transformation of an ordinary savegame into the TITLE.DAT file, which is the demo game loaded as a background of the Transport Tycoon's main menu screen.

What's New

New in version 0.92:

• TTD format extensions introduced in TTDPatch 2.0 are now recognized in uncompressed savegames (the 'big' files). SV1Codec will even notify you if it thinks TTDPatch 2.0 or later may be required to play the game due to format extensions.
• Bug fixed: number of players was incorrectly detected if the -ttd option was used. Now SV1Codec always requires an extension override option (-sv0, -sv1, -sv2, -ss0 or -ss1) if it is to search for an existing savegame but cannot detect the number of players for some reason.
• Bug fixed: using -c with third letter override (-trt, -trc, -trh, -try or -trp) and output directory specified resulted in an assertion failure.

Download it

The most recent version is 0.92. You can get it here: sv1codec-0.92.zip
The source code is currently included in the SV1Codec distribution archive.

Older versions available: 0.90, 0.91

How to use it

To install SV1Codec, simply extract sv1codec.exe into a directory with your savegames, or one of the directories listed by the PATH environment variable. A good place might be the COMMAND folder in your Windows directory.

SV1Codec is a Windows console application, so it has to be run from the Windows command prompt. If you do not feel yourself familiar with the command prompt, download COMMAND.BAT, put it in your savegame directory and run by double-clicking it, then try following examples in the documentation. To exit the command prompt, type "exit".

To get the full list of switches, type "sv1codec -h | more" at the command prompt.

To fix the file checksums of all *.SV? files in a directory (in case you have the DOS version of TTD, and get the "Game load failed" message when trying to load some of them), get the FIXALL.BAT batch file, put it in the savegame directory and run. The output will be saved to sv1codec.log.

Note: For the batch files to work, sv1codec.exe must be either in the same directory as the batch file or somewhere in the PATH, as mentioned above.

Uncompressed savegames

See my very detailed description of the structure of uncompressed TTD savegames.

Want to know more?

If you're brave — and understand IA-32 assembly language — you can try looking at my attempt to disassemble TTD. You might also want to look at TTDPatch's source code (or download TTDPatch sources nicely packaged into an archive).