I've never attempted to reverse engineer the savegame files for OP1 though I've thought about it. I tinkered around with a couple of them in a hex editor... there's a lot of plain text strings in there which is encouraging but I've never really had the time to do any sort of comparisons to see what's what, what changes, etc.
What I do remember from observing several files is there appears to be some sort of a section header or marker. I don't know exactly what it means but it's the same values that are repeated with some sort of numeric index:
dcbSC## (hex: 64 63 62 53 43) where '##' is a two digit hex value starting with 01 at the very beginning of the file.
Of note, the first five bytes of every savegame file starts with SC004 (hex: 53 43 30 30 34). Also of note is that the last 7 bytes of every savegame file is dcbSC0b. Unsure what it means other than a possible end of file (EOF) type of marker.
There are several sections with what looks like regular patterns. I'm not sure what they are but if I had to guess I'd say it has to do with the tile data itself. This is just a guess, of course. I haven't gotten any further than this.
