AnnoZone Forum

Dear triumpa

Nice to see someone having motivation and new ideas. Since I don't own a copy of Anno 1602 I do not know the structure of it's game files, neither can I take original game files to study. So I took a random scenario from Annopool (to be concrete, this) and tried to find the important section(s).

If you open this file in any hex editor (an editor for binary files, like Okteta (GNU/Linux, M$ Windows), HxD (M$ Windows) or dhex (GNU/Linux)) you can see after some chaos of bytes a string "AUFTRAG4". After that header there is some part with bytes whose meaning isn't obvious and just hereafter plain text which you could try to translate. Make sure you have created a backup copy of your file and switched your editor into an overwrite mode. Now you can write you new translation to the file, but it seems it must not be longer than until you find the next header - in my case INSEL5 - and you only overwrite bytes with the value 0. Now try to load this scenario in Anno 1602 and look at the in-game description.

Though as I already mentioned above I do not own a copy of the game and thus cannot test it out by myself. The above are only some thoughts on it, needing more investigation to be sure what to do. Since the file structure of game files of Anno 1602 seems to be very different to what I've seen in Anno 1503 I'm not able to write an easy extractor. Sorry.

So to answer your first question on how to open the files: You definitely need a hex editor (see above) to work with them. As far as I know there is no tool to extract them.

Hope I could help.