Codemeyer.net

I have already written about my love for Microprose Formula One Grand Prix, so I won’t go into that again. But today is special, because it marks the 25th anniversary of me purchasing the game for the Amiga. Ah yes, on 22nd February 1992, a gawky twelve-year-old bought a game that would forever change his life! Good times!

To celebrate that momentous occasion, I figured that I should try to release some of the stuff I’m working on related to F1GP, and so here it is: ArgData!

The ArgData API allows you to edit a lot of things related to F1GP, such as car colors, driver performance, player horsepower levels and various settings. The full list of features is available both at ArgData’s own site, and at its GitHub page. What the API does for you is provide a class library with helpful classes and methods for updating all sorts of data, so that you don’t have to know the exact byte location of stuff inside F1GP’s GP.EXE file.

As an example, this is how you would update the player’s (i.e., your) horsepower level, “cheating” to make you faster in a straight line than any of the AI cars 🙂

var exeFile = GpExeFile.At(@"C:\Games\GPRIX\GP.EXE");
var writer = PlayerHorsepowerWriter.For(exeFile);
writer.WritePlayerHorsepower(999);   // default is 716, LOL

Surely you can agree with me that this is easier than knowing that you should write the value 22,610 at byte position 19,848? Well, that’s one example, and I won’t go into too many details here regarding how the API is used, the other sites provide that information. There is even a reference section at the ArgData site. Lots of stuff in the documentation needs improving, but it’s a start… And this is just version 0.14 of the API, there’s still a bit of stuff that can and will be added.

On another note, there may (or may not) be some stuff related to the ArgData project that is worthy of future blog posts, so if I get around to it, maybe I will fill in some details here and there in due time. Build server setup, automated tests, publishing to NuGet, etc.

But until then, go ahead and grab ArgData from NuGet if you feel like it, and start messing around. To get started, you can follow the Quick Start guide and change the top of the color at the top of the sidepods to make the 1991 Jordan go from the one on the left to the one on the right. Fancy stuff, eh?

Links

ArgData’s website: http://manicomio.se/argdata/
NuGet package: https://www.nuget.org/packages/ArgData/
GitHub source: https://github.com/codemeyer/ArgData