Posts tagged "reversing"
Can you complete the Oregon Trail if you wait at a river for 14272 years: A study
Sat 11 January 2025
If you're into retro computing, you probably know about Oregon Trail; a simulation of the hardships faced by a group of colonists in 1848 as they travel by covered wagon from Independence Missouri to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The game was wildly successful in the US education market, with the various editions selling 65 million copies. What you probably don't know is the game's great untold secret.
Two years ago, Twitch streamer albrot discovered a bug in the code for crossing rivers. One of the options is to "wait to see if conditions improve"; waiting a day will consume food but not recalculate any health conditions, granting your party immortality.
From this conceit the Oregon Trail Time Machine was born; a multiday livestream of the game as the party waits for conditions to improve at the final Snake River crossing until the year 10000, to see if the withered travellers can make it to the ruins of ancient Oregon. The first attempt ended in tragedy; no matter what albrot tried, the party would succumb to disease and die almost immediately.
A couple of days before New Years Eve 2025, albrot reached out and asked if I knew anything about Apple II hacking. In reality the answer was no, I knew three things about the Apple II:
- It has a MOS 6502 processor
- It was popular in the US educational market
- Something something Carmen Sandiego something Prince of Persia?
But all old computers are basically the same right? Specialist knowledge is for cowards.
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Intro to ROM Hacking: Ghost House
Tue 09 June 2020
A long time between updates! I've been distracted by working on ScummVM's Macromedia Director engine, but it's mostly bugfixing and I couldn't find a good focal point. So on a whim I made this! The previous video took maybe a week, this was a good test of writing/filming/editing in two days.
In this video Scott takes apart "Ghost House" by Sega, and figures out how to remove the obnoxious screen flashing effects by reverse engineering the Z80 code. This contains a full step-by-step explanation of how to use the MAME debugger for hacking ROMs, even if you don't …
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Let's Reverse: Adventures of Lomax graphics
Wed 25 September 2019
I guess I'm a YouTuber now. Wonder how long I can fight this newfound urge to tase a dead rat.
In this video Scott takes apart "Adventures of Lomax" by Psygnosis and reverse engineers the graphics data. This didn't require taking apart the code, and contains a step-by-step explanation of the black-box analysis process. A good introduction for anyone getting started in reversing games!
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DDD 2018: Reverse Engineering is Good and also For Everyone
Sat 20 April 2019
Last year I gave my first talk at DDD Perth 2018! It was about reverse engineering, how I think everyone interested should be encouraged to try it, and some useful tips for people starting out. Here is the slide deck.
Apologies that the audio is a bit muffled; the microphone had a recording issue, so instead enjoy some lo-fi camcorder goodness. Thanks again to DDD for having me, and for going the extra mile to accomodate first-time presenters. Extra special thanks to David for salvaging these black box recordings (on a long weekend, no less!).
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Introducing Mr. Crowbar! Untold minutes of reverse engineering fun for ages 26-29!
Thu 22 October 2015
I believe that one of the best ways of allowing creativity to overcome limited technical skill is to build upon stuff that already exists. Take game modding; just try and count the number of successful games that started out as a modification of an existing one. Would these developers have gotten anywhere as far with their idea if they couldn't build on an existing engine and assets, not to mention community support? WOULD THEY?
Indeed, game modding is an important springboard for new developers to cut their teeth in a familiar setting and form a good understanding of how games work in the real world. There is, however, one rather large barrier of entry for people to start playing with the innards of their favourite game: tools. Occasionally the engine author will encourage custom content and give their developer tools out for free. But most of the time games are 100% not designed with modding in mind, leaving it up to a tiny number of skilled reverse engineers to write their own tools and share them with the community.
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