Category Archives: Reverse Engineering

Brainstorming and case studies relating to craft of software reverse engineering.

Wiki Never Forgets

Anyone can post anything on any Wiki, subject to a few access control restrictions (such as requiring registration). Stuff can just as easily be deleted but it will show up in an article’s history. I have always wondered what happens when someone enters something controversial that must subsequently be removed. Wiki never forgets.

I visited the XentaxWiki recently and noticed there was a problem with a resource format called BXP from a game called 3D Sex Villa. The article’s content currently states:

Off display pending decision on legal status of information.

The article’s talk page contains some legal wrangling brought on my the creators of the format. Regardless, the original technical format information can be unearthed through the article’s history, viewable by anyone who understands basic Wiki.

DoubleTwist Ventures

DVD Jon reports that he is joining up with a curious Bay Area outfit (or, for all we know, perhaps he IS the outfit) named DoubleTwist Ventures, an organization that explains its charter as focusing on:

the development of interoperability solutions for digital media and the reverse engineering of proprietary systems for which licensing options are non-existent or impractical.

Sounds suspiciously similar to what we multimedia hackers do purely for our leisure-time programming. Live the dream, Jon. Get paid for what you love to do!

All I know about the company is what the front page of the website reports, which is a text blurb pasted on a picture — very 1996. Seems out of place in this day and age. The mailto: link has a bad email address, too (though it may be a counter-spam measure and the text in the picture looks valid).

RE-NES

Notepad time! (This is where I just use this blog as a piece of scratch paper for random investigations.)

Solar Jetman’s password entry screen

Reverse engineering the password system from an old NES game…

Continue reading →

Nintendo Intelligence Agency

I spent the vast majority of my junior high free time in front of a scratchy television connected to a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) console. (Try not to act too surprised.) Many of the more involved Nintendo games either had battery-backed RAM on the cartridge PCB for saving games or employed a password system. The game would issue a password at various junctures in the game that you were expected to copy down accurately so that you could resume your game at a later time. Password lengths were commensurate with the complexity of the game and the amount of information required to represent a game’s state. For example, some games obviously had a table of plaintext 4- or 5-character passwords since the only information being saved was which of the game’s 8 levels the player has just passed. On the other end of the spectrum, the most complex password system I ever encountered was for Wall Street Kid, the groundbreaking stock market sim for the NES. It was a variable length password (at least 50 characters was nominal, if memory serves) with just about every letter of the English alphabet, upper and lower case, numbers, and various other symbols. I don’t think I ever successfully copied down a password for that game.