FIFA 2002 Save Exploit

[Zephiles]

This one is a bit finicky, as the exploit involves a buffer overflow that ends up reading/writing far out-of-bounds of the buffer and ends up reading from dynamic memory to overwrite the saved LR on the stack. Both the US and JP versions were tested on console, and there was one instance where the US version did not work, but this was also when the memory card was formatted via GCMM on a Japanese Wii. After this the memory card was reformatted via a US GameCube, and then the gci from this project and Swiss were restored to it via GCMM afterwards, and it worked correctly five times in a row. So in short, it seems to work fine assuming that the first US test failed due to GCMM mismatching region shenanigans.

The repo can be found here, and the gci files can be found here.

[sakax]

And he keeps going

[Louis]

I tested this exploit on both a USA Gamecube and a JP Gamecube as well. Sorry the video and audio quality is not that good, I have a very old capture setup.

FIFA 2002 JP Demonstration
FIFA 2002 USA Demonstration

The initial error when I tried loading the USA save was resolved when I wrote an arbitrary USA save to the memory card after formatting. Not sure if writing that arbitrary data changed the language encoding or if formatting memory card in the IPL did.

Shoutout to Zephiles for their continued amazing work on these save exploits!

[Papy.G]

Thanks for the videos, your CG Disc reader seems to struggle, it takes sooo long to know what disc is inside. I have never seen that loading screen on any of my GCs (or maybe it doesn't exist on PAL GCs, that have later IPL FW compared to NTSC ones).

[Louis]

Thanks for the videos, your CG Disc reader seems to struggle, it takes sooo long to know what disc is inside. I have never seen that loading screen on any of my GCs (or maybe it doesn't exist on PAL GCs, that have later IPL FW compared to NTSC ones).

The USA video was filmed on one of my childhood Gamecubes (silver XD one), so it's seen quite a lot of use