Alright, well I have been trying to mod Armored Core For Answer for a long time now. This isn't exactly Jtag modding, but it is way above the other modding section on TTG.


Armored core for Answer is a small community. I was the first person to discover modding in the savegame, or at least the first person to bring it onto online, that was about 2 years ago. It was simple things, changing values of points added onto your robot to make it stronger, change the games max allowance of 50 points to hex edits max allowance of 255 points. It essentially made my robot 5 times faster then everyone else's robot.

In the game you can do a quick boost in a certain direction. If you boost forward, you must boost left, right, or back, before you can boost forward again. You can boost forward two times in a row, but there is a long delay between the boosts. The game doesn't allow you to take off your boosters, I found the location of them in hex and removed only the side boosters (there are front, side, and back boosters). With a modded controller (and quickboost being signed to right trigger) I am able to essentially flick the stick left and forward allowing me to boost forward with basically zero delay. There is no delay when there is no side booster, so as long as each time I click forward, I also click left or right, I can click forward again and have to wait no time for a delay.

This modding is fun and all but I want to take things to the next level. I want to mod the actual stats of the parts in the game. Taking the iso onto my computer has helped a little, but a problem with that is that none of the actual stats for the parts are stored in the iso (as far as I am concerned). When you play the game, there is no update from xbox live but there are updates to your "regulations", these are basically updates in the game, but you can choose which update to run in the options menu. If you go to options, you can pick from 1.00, 1.10, 1.15, 1.20, 1.30, and 1.40. 1.0-1.20 are all preloaded on the disk, you will automatically get them if you play offline. Changing the regulations in the options menu, changes the stats on your equipped parts on your robot.

Getting the regulation file onto my computer is obviously no big deal, and with horizon, I can extract the .DAT file within the regulations file. Using and hex editor, the .DAT file shows nothing, but after I unpack the .DAT file with offzip, I can see some more promising things. I can never see the stats of the parts, but I can see the name of each part, and each name appears 6 times, in 6 different sub sections all labeled under different regulation areas, is, 1.10, 1.15. The name appears under each one, seemingly having 6 different types of code on the part to change its' stats for each regulation.

The problem comes when I try to edit anything. I can never find the stats for each part, I'm assuming the stats are somewhere on the disk and the regulation file uses some type of multiplication to modify the stats? Maybe something like, basestatx0.998 or something? In the unpacked file, I see a lot of things followed by the word bin, things like, 1.10.bin.1.15.bin and sideboosters.bin.gunblade.bin. Is there some way to find out where the heck these bin files are located? I've looked all over on the iso, there's nothing. The iso doesn't contain much. And the XeX, I've spent plenty of time looking into that, not much coming out of that either. Even the float values don't seem promising.

I've tried to edit some basic things, change a letter in the name of something. I repack everything with repack, replace the .DAT file in horizon, rehash and resign it, then place it back on my console. As soon as I load it up, my xbox freezes.

If someone, anyone, could help me modify the contents of this regulation file, or help me find the stats located in the game, I would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks a million!