I'd like to suggest that this is a bad idea, not for legal or ethical reasons, but out of sympathy for you, the programmer - you'll be painting yourself into a corner in that a large chunk of the game won't be even slightly modifiable if you should want or need to make even a tiny modification.
That said, to find a save game file:
1. Save your progress in the game.
2. Alt-tab or kill the game program so as not to give it a chance to write anything else to disk.
3. Find the most recently modified file(s) on your hard disk.
Now comes the fun part: since the original programmers knew that they would be the only ones accessing the save game data, they had no reason to make it human-readable or even sensible. As big10p pointed out, they may have intentionally made it more difficult to crack. Save slightly different situations and compare the files to track down where things are stored: you may have won the match with 12 points, but there could be hundreds of copies of the number 12 - win again with only 11 points and determine which 12s changed to 11s. This will likely be painfully time-consuming.
With this kind of project, you need to determine if everything will be possible before you invest any time into it: will you be able to bootstrap the game into running the match you want immediately? will you be able to get the game to terminate when a match has finished? or will your players have to click through a menu system in the game to start your saved match and then remember to quit the game after the match so they return to your management game?
XCOM: UFO Defense (the bestest game ever) worked like this, in that the strategic base-management game would save to disk the details of the mission to be played, then execute the tactical part of the game. That would, in turn, write the results of the mission to disk and execute the strategic part of the game. I believe this was done so they'd have more memory to play with. I think they wrote both halves themselves, however. ;)
That said, to find a save game file:
1. Save your progress in the game.
2. Alt-tab or kill the game program so as not to give it a chance to write anything else to disk.
3. Find the most recently modified file(s) on your hard disk.
Now comes the fun part: since the original programmers knew that they would be the only ones accessing the save game data, they had no reason to make it human-readable or even sensible. As big10p pointed out, they may have intentionally made it more difficult to crack. Save slightly different situations and compare the files to track down where things are stored: you may have won the match with 12 points, but there could be hundreds of copies of the number 12 - win again with only 11 points and determine which 12s changed to 11s. This will likely be painfully time-consuming.
With this kind of project, you need to determine if everything will be possible before you invest any time into it: will you be able to bootstrap the game into running the match you want immediately? will you be able to get the game to terminate when a match has finished? or will your players have to click through a menu system in the game to start your saved match and then remember to quit the game after the match so they return to your management game?
XCOM: UFO Defense (the bestest game ever) worked like this, in that the strategic base-management game would save to disk the details of the mission to be played, then execute the tactical part of the game. That would, in turn, write the results of the mission to disk and execute the strategic part of the game. I believe this was done so they'd have more memory to play with. I think they wrote both halves themselves, however. ;)