The Ethics of... Cheats

“The Ethics of…” is planned as a little series of posts exploring some of the things that have been known to nip at people’s consciences when playing GT Legends. Track-cutting, pausing, that kind of thing. Of course, if you’re playing online then things are more clear-cut: obey both the letter and the spirit of the rules laid down by the organising body. You really don’t want to gain a reputation as someone who isn’t a fair competitor.

Offline, though, things are rather different – and these days, that’s how most of us will enjoy GTL. When you’re simply experiencing the single-player game against AI cars (or alone, if you’re practising or hotlapping) then it’s largely just down to what you feel comfortable with. This time, I’ll look at the two most popular GT Legends cheats, both of which I have used for many years without any real qualms.

 

File info screen in Windows 7 (my game is not installed in the standard Steam directory)

Unlock all cars and tracks

When you first install GTL, you’ll notice that only two cars and a handful of tracks are available for you to race with. (You can drive other cars in the Test Drive mode accessible via the Car Dealer section, but that’s all.) To get hold of the rest, the “official” way is to do well enough in the Cup Challenge career mode to unlock new stuff and earn enough credits to buy those cars. If that’s how you like to play GTL, then you don’t need to read any further.

However, it is possible to have all the built-in cars and tracks available to you from the start. Back when I was playing GT Legends online a decade and more ago, everyone had activated this cheat. That made the attempts of one of the developers (10tacle I think, but memory may be faulty) to threaten forums that included it – to the extent of mentioning lawyers at least once or twice – look particularly silly. Thankfully those days are long gone. Here’s what to do:

1. Start with a clean install of GTL from Steam

2. Find the directory where the game is stored – from your Steam library, right-click on GT Legends and go to Manage → Browse Local Files…
   

3. Check that the file GTL.exe is here to make sure you have the right directory

4. From Windows, use Notepad (not a more complex word processor) to create a brand new empty file called TG2001.DYN – the name must be in all caps, and you should check that Windows hasn’t actually called it TG2001.DYN.txt as that won’t work!

5. Check that the new file has a size of 0 bytes (zero)

6. Launch GT Legends

7. Set up a new player profile

8. You should now be able to drive anything, anywhere!

If you already have GTL installed, don’t panic – you can still add the TG2001.DYN file. From that point on, any new driver profile will have the cheat applied, though existing profiles will not. Addon cars will be available from the start, though you may still need to find the credits to buy them. Fortunately, there’s a solution to that problem too...

 

Brickyard Legends Team's Renault 8 Gordini [RD], purchased using the money cheat
Your interface will look slightly different if you're not using the HQ Anniversary Patch [RD]

Make yourself rich

Even with the above cheat applied, you still won’t have many credits in your account, and that can be a problem when adding third-party mod cars as some of those are expensive. The simplest way to change this is to make the game pay you for buying a car! This is how to do it:

1. You’ll need a car you don’t currently own, so if you’ve already applied the cheat above that will mean downloading a third-party car from somewhere

2. Make sure Windows is set to display all file extensions. It’s best to Google this as the method varies between versions of Windows

3. Install the car to the game as explained by its readme, and note down the class it belongs to, but do not start driving it and do not launch GTL

4. In your GTL directory, head to GameData → Teams → [class] → [car directory]

5. From here, go into the subdirectory of the first car and look for a file that has a filetype of .car or .xcar

6. Load this file into Notepad (it's a plain text file) and scroll right down to the bottom

7. You’ll see a line like value=15000 – change that number to a big negative one, eg value=-500000000

8. Save the file and launch GTL

9. At the Car Dealer, choose the exact car you edited. You’ll see its price listed as “POA”

10. Buy the car; it will appear in your garage (still listed as “POA”) and you’ll be a multi-millionaire!

I have used both of these cheats for a long, long time, and I have absolutely no pangs about that. Remember, GT Legends came out in 2005, years before gamers had to worry about automated cheat detection and bans from gaming networks. As I said earlier, it was absolutely the norm for the “unlock everything” cheat to be used, whatever 10tacle may have felt about it. If you’re not happy with these cheats, then don’t use them – but if you do, I don’t think there’s any need to feel guilty.