atari2600a wrote:
I never looked into it, but probably not. The only reason ACWW was region-specific was because all the different character sets, etc & the game cart was already jam packed! (I mean, damn, 128MB only w/o extra bankswitching HW, but still imagine how much SROM that game requires! The GC version took up an entire 59-block memory card!
Like a PS1 block, a GCN block is 8 KiB, making the 57-block file of ACPG 456 KiB in size. But Nintendo games tend to keep two copies of the state in the save file just in case the power is lost while saving, and that's probably the case for ACPG. I don't know whether anyone has tried to decode ACPG's save.
ACWW uses a 256 KiB save chip. The aibohack guy figured out that the state of ACWW (UE) is 0x15FE0 bytes long, about 88 KiB, and figured out most of the data layout. In this game, it is
known that there are two copies of the state in the save chip. Of that state, 8 KiB is dedicated to the town map (16 acres of 256 cells, 2 bytes per cell), and another 23 KiB for forty-two custom 32x32 pixel textures (eight for each player, one for each CPU, one for Blanca, and one for the town flag, 560 bytes each). After the 176 KiB dual state is a block of 300 safe deposit boxes, 75 for each player.
Games with that much state could never have be made for the NES during its commercial life; replication would have been too expensive. And I think that's why SimCity for NES was canceled at the last minute; like Earthbound Prototype, it would have cost too much to replicate.