TUTORIAL: changing the foul-out limit

[Andrew]

If you are like me and enjoy playing shorter quarters, you may have noticed that this game doesn’t allow you to change the foul-out limit, meaning that depending your quarter length, foul trouble is basically nonexistent.

This tutorial will show you how to change that.

You will need:
- Cheat Engine.
- A hex editor of your choice; I use Hex Workshop

This is how it works:
1) With the hex editor, go to “Users\[USER]\AppData\Roaming\2K Sports\NBA 2K13\Saves” and open Settings.STG

2) Go to offset A0 and copy the four bytes coming after it. In my case they are “BF FA F3 FD”, but this will vary depending on your settings.

If you are curious: when converted to binary, each of these bytes is comprised of 8 bits, which in turn represent some gameplay settings (mostly game rules such as goaltending, travelling, out of bounds, etc). This is why these four bytes will vary from game to game. So just copy the ones you have on your file.

3) Close the hex editor.

4) Boot up your game and wait until it is in the main menu screen.

5) Open Cheat Engine and click on the “Select a process to open” button (right below “File”).

6) Select NBA2K13.exe and hit OK.

7) On the scanning panel (right-hand side), tick “Hex”; on “Value Type”, select “Array of bytes”. On “Memory Scan Options”, make sure “Writable” is toggled on.

8) On value, paste the 4 bytes you copied from your Settings.STG during step (2) and hit “First Scan”.

9) You should get one result. Right click on it and then “Browse this memory region”.

10) You will see a bunch of bytes in green. The very first 4 bytes are exactly the ones you pasted. The one after it should be a “06”. This is precisely the “foul out limit”.

11) Put the cursor on 06 and change it to whatever you want. I believe 00 means no foul out, but I haven’t tested.

12) Now we want to save these settings. Go back to your game and change any setting. Example: “options” -> “game settings” -> “presentation” -> “free throw help”. Change that to the next value (on to off or vice-versa). This is just to trigger the “save settings” command.

13) Go back to the main menu. You should see the save settings message with the rotating disk. Your settings are now saved. Now you can go back to e.g. “free throw help” and change it back to what it was before.

14) You can now close the Cheat Engine and proceed with your day.

You may have noticed that the byte “06” was already there when you were browsing the Settings.STG file. In theory, you can change it already in the hex editor, AS LONG AS you know how to recalculate the checksum bytes at the beginning of the file. I don’t. So it is better to make the game do this for you.

If you have questions, let me know. Cheers!

[Andrew]

Excellent work!