Preamble

I had to scour the internet for several hours today to determine the solution this, myself, so I felt I should do the world a favor and put it all together in writing somewhere so that others could benefit from it.

There have been a number of unit cap patchers created over the past years that allow Total Annihilation to go past its default unit cap (250 retail, up to 500), up to as many as 5000 units. However, several of these patchers are not compatible with 64-bit environments, and while some can be coaxed to run under the Mac version using WINE, they're less-than-optimal and can cause other problems if they fail, requiring that you reinstall the game. This method directly edits two hex addresses in TOTALA.exe (the game executable), enabling the higher unit caps without requiring any third-party files, other than a hex editor. There's a little work involved, but the whole process is a lot cleaner than adding extra files to your game folder or fumbling around with getting incompatible 32-bit programs to run, and is also (as far as I know) the only realistic way to change the unit cap on the Mac GOG version.

Requirements

- A hex editor:
0xED (Mac)
Frhed (Windows)
- TOTALA.exe (Located in your game directory, or inside the app's "Package Contents" on the Mac)

Instructions

1. Find TOTALA.exe in your Total Annihilation program directory. On the Mac this is in "/Applications/Total Annihilation Commander Pack.app/Contents/Resources/drive_c/Program Files/GOG.com/Total Annihilation".
2. Make a copy of it somewhere else, so that you can restore it if you screw up.
3. Open TOTALA.exe in your Hex editor. If necessary, set the mode to "Little Endian" and make sure you are viewing hex values, NOT decimal values.
4. Find offsets "90A59" and "90A66", and find/change their values according to the following options:

- Default (500) --- F4 01 (Look for this address pair first, and select it to change it)
- 1500 Units --- DC 05
- 2500 Units --- C4 09
- 5000 Units --- 88 13

Note that you must change BOTH values to match. So if you change offset 90A59 to "C4 09" (2500 units), you MUST change the addresses at 90A66 to "C4 09".
5. Save your changes.
6. (Optional) If "TOTALA.INI" also exists in your game directory, edit it in your favorite text editor to reflect your new unit cap, or to optionally set any limit lower than the one you changed in the program executable, i.e. if you set your maximum limit to 1500 units, you can edit TOTALA.INI to any value equal to or less than 1500.

If you accidentally broke your game executable, drag your backup copy of TOTALA.exe back into the game directory and overwrite the broken one. If you forgot to back it up, download a new copy of the game from GOG.com.

I've tested and confirmed this with all of the unit caps listed above on the GOG.com Mac version of Total Annihilation. It may work for original retail copies, but I don't have one on hand to check and confirm. Note that if you have modified your game executable in such a way that it no longer works, GOG.com may not be able to support you. Make these changes at your own risk, but if you backed up your game executable, you should be in the clear.

If you have any questions about this, or get stuck along the way (editing hex doesn't exactly come naturally to everyone), just post in this topic and I'll try to get you pointed in the right direction.

Hi there,

I've just tried it and it didn't work. I found the offsets and to get any values I had to clik on 90a66 and drag it to one side. thanks to that the values appeared on the screen. I've changed the BGR value to DC05 and some of the numbers changed to 1500 (as I thought it would be the number of units allowed). Saved the changes entered a game and built units as fast as possible but limit got stuck at 250. I hope there's something wrong I'm doing here.

Just to let you know I've upgraded my mac to OS X sierra ver 10.12

thanks

I just signed up to post this reply. Thank you! It worked great. I'm on Windows 10 64-bit using the Steam version (I think 3.1?) of TA. I downloaded a hex editor, found the values you mentioned and edited them to DC 05. It worked great! Now I can have 1500 units.

Thank you for taking the time to write this post.

Didn't work. Just prevented the game from loading altogether.

I do wish that GOG had put in the TOTALA.INI file. That was part of the official patches just so that the unit count could be easily increased and it was the first thing I looked for.

I did try this right now and set it to 5000 units, but my savegame still can't build any more units. Do you have to start a new game or beat the current level to have the new unit limit recognized?