I'm enjoying this game, but I'm getting a bit tired of having to count every penny, not to mention seeing awesome ships and weapons for sale that I won't be able to afford for another three missions or so... I'd like to just kick my bank-account upstairs, so I can concentrate on the space-strategy aspect of the game.

Unfortunately, the changes the game went through when being adapted to work with Vista have made all the old trainers and hacking-methods invalid - there's still some floating about the 'net, but they're uniformly nonfunctional. I also dug around in my save-files with a hex-editor looking for my account-number, but that didn't work either... I guess those values are encoded.

So, anyone know of functional methods, or got some suggestions on how to locate my account balance in the save-files?

EDIT: Ah, nevermind - I figured it out. The save-files write out your balance in BACKWARDS hexadecimal! The problem is solved, and my bank-balance is now in the 9 figures... ^_^

No idea how this works in the GOG version, but in the game demo + original CD version you can modify your starting fleet and equipment with a few easy steps.

In the data dir of "Star Wolves" find the data.dat and open it with WinZip or
WinRar or similar.
...in "\data\scripts\" extract the file "InitTeamScript.script" to
...\Star Wolves\data\scripts folder (if it does not exist create one)
...open the file with Notepad or similar.

As described in this wonderful editing guide you can change pretty much everything about your starting economic/equipment situation. For starters, there's a line that reads "SetPlayerCredits(5000) ;" If I were to change the (5000) to (500000), that would give me 500,000 credits for spare fighters and upgrades for the Star Wolf.

Edit: Found another way to cheat. Go to the data/AI folder and look for a file labeled 'sellingcoef.ini' and open it. It has some wonderful options for increasing/decreasing the buy/sell value of equipment.

There may be more if you look around.

Yeah, I'm familiar with those methods. Those are the 'old hacking-methods' I mentioned. They don't work anymore - all the files you're talking about no longer exist - they've all been mashed together into a big 'data.dat', which is too huge and complex to practically edit.

It's obviously not a cheat, but you could try playing with lower difficulty settings. From what I hear income from missions and salvaged goods, and the rate you gain pilot points is the only difference between the difficulty settings.

Not 100% sure if it's true though, since I've only played halfway through a normal mode game myself. Can someone confirm this?

The old editing hacks still work just fine for the GoG version of the game. I myself have used them to modify my starting equipment, skill points, everything.

They work fine with no issues.

Have you tried extracting the data.dat with 7-zip or similar, on the GOG version? Worked for me.

Don't repack the files, make a folder named exactly the same as the file you originally decompressed, put the modified file inside the new folder and the game will read the modifications in the folder over the original files in the dat file. Check out gamefaqs for specifics.

The old hacks and tricks to modify your fleet and points DO work just fine.

There's an old Memory Hack utility called "Cheese-Omatic" that works for simple values.

Will require you to ALT+Tab in and out 2-3 times for it to find the memory location for the cash, but shouldn't take more than 2 minutes. Then you can put in a nice value, or lock it to 1 value as long as it's running.

Should be easy to find on the intawebz.

How do you find the data file that you need to unzip in the folder? Im having a hard time finding it.

Step by step:
1. Find your Star Wolves Directory. [Should be something like C:\Games\StarWolves
2. In the Star Wolves Directory, there's a DATA folder, with a file called Data.dat
3. Open data.dat in WinRAR or WinZip
4. Follow the guidelines in the tutorial linked above.

You might want to associate notepad with .script files before you try to open the Teaminitscript.script file so it automatically opens it correctly. Then when you close it, WinRAR will ask if you want to save the file in the archive. Just say yes.

I have the Steam version of SW1 and I was able to use Cheat Engine to easily find and control my credit account! The GOG version should be just the same as far as Cheat Engine is concerned.

Even with that, there's still only so much you can buy in each intermission between maps! You can still find yourself with not enough topmost level equipment!

The ending is quite simply impossible, no matter what ships/equips you have!