Mass Effect downgrade - can files be fixed?

[MatSpikeYinsen]

Not exactly a modding question, but technical enough that I hope you'll indulge my request.

For several months I happily played only the Mass Effect 1 section of the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, creating five characters plus one for a friend, but then disaster struck.  First I forgot my password to the EA app which the LE requires you to log into before you can play; thankfully I was still able to play even without being logged in for a while.  But recently some new glitch developed where I could start the game playing, but it wouldn't actually launch the program after waiting several minutes.  Disgusted with this problem and seeing no hope I could ever fix it without access to the company's app (whose password recovery was tied to an email account I'd lost access to), I gave up on playing the LE ever again and deleted it to free up hard drive space.  Even if I thought it would work again and I could spare the space to reinstall it, I literally don't feel like spending another six hours or so not using my computer while it redownloads this enormous three-games-in-one Steam Pack, given that I have little desire to ever play the other two games.

So instead I bought the original 2007 Mass Effect as a standalone Steam game, which doesn't have any EA busybody interference preventing me from playing it.  Alas, having created a new character to test it, there's a completely different file format for save games, and while I'm capable of copying one of my old save files from MELE and editing the filename to have the same extension as the new save I made within ME07, this unsurprisingly failed to make the file detectable, let alone interpretable, by a program older than the one with which it was made.

I'll never have any "hacking" knowledge much more sophisticated than what I'm just asking, so as a humble servant of the Imperium who can't appease a machine spirit to save his life, I ask the local Tech Priests to simply tell me whether it's *theoretically* possible to get the old save files rejiggered to work in the earlier, less f*#@ed-by-EA program, or if I'm boned and will have to manually reconstruct those characters as best my memory can manage.  If the answer is that the old characters are gone forever, well I'm no worse off than I was before posting.  But if there's a way of making it happen, then I'd probably be willing to pay another $5 or $10 to some tech-savvy person just for the service of editing the LE save files so they'll work on 07.  Maybe more if it's such a big "hacking" job that such a low price in an insult, but I already paid $30 for the game in addition to whatever MELE cost me (I think I got that on sale, as with every other game I ever buy off Steam, but 07 was an exception because I knew it would be worth fully $30, even if I had to play it all over from scratch).  It sucks if those characters are gone, but I wasn't that far into the game (one and only one of my 7 total characters had progressed far enough to land the Mako on Liara's planet, the others had never yet moved past the Citadel), so it isn't the biggest of deals, and only my deep affection for "my Shepherd" makes me even consider throwing more money into what is already my far and away most expensive game.

[AndalayBay]

Rather than wasting more money, I suggest you contact EA customer support to see if they can transfer your account to your new email address.