[Q] Windows 8 file coding

That is because the file is not stored as plain text and is raw binary data. Notepad then attempts to try to load it as plain text and as you can see fails miserably to make anything of it.

Realistically you can't so I suggest learning how to play the game properly rather than editing your save state

Yeah... the file could be anything from a binary representation of in-memory data structures to encrypted plain text. Without decompiling the app, I probably couldn't tell you which. Totally not worth the effort.

It is not necessarily a straight forward process.
Decompiling the app can be a hit and miss procedure, not really legal either. You would have to attempt to fully reverse engineer the file format from what may be partially broken code and then write your own code in order to load and edit the files.

Not a process which can be done by a newcomer in under half an hour (or insert any other time period), or one that you can easily write a straight up tutorial for.


If it was encrypted plaintext (unlikely) not raw binary structures (very very common), the point of encrypting it is that a person cant decrypt it. There are numerous encryption methods available and they could have used any one. Brute forcing encryption can be very very slow with times to decode ranging from minutes to months, and not knowing what encryption method is used your probably looking at years as you try each method separately. Again, not really something a tutorial can be done for, Cryptography is a fine art, reverse engineering encryption is perhaps the finest part of Cryptography, its an experts field.

Eh... depending on the encryption used, and the way the app is compiled, it may be easy to reverse. You'd be amazed how many apps (mobile or otherwise) use something stupid like AES-ECB with a hardcoded key of something like MD5("THESECRETKEY"), or even just XORing with a constant string. That said, Microsoft does make it easy to do better than that, with their incredibly-simple-to-use-but-hard-to-reverse Data Protection API for apps.