s-macke

4 ms·

1.
by s-macke 13d ago
I use a step-by-step approach: 1. For each topic, write a result Markdown file in `spec/`. 2. Identify the file formats. 3. Reverse Engineer and extract all assets, followed by manual review. This works in 90% of the cases. 4. Determin
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by s-macke 13d ago
Stunt Car Racer from Geoff Crammond published by MicroProse, not Stunts from Distinctive Software.
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by s-macke 13d ago
I would like to see all of them :-) One of the most difficult reverse-engineering projects from that era for me was Stunt Car Racer on the C64 (also ported to DOS). It features a highly optimized 8-bit 3D graphics and physics engine. Fable
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by s-macke 2mo ago
The BSD Games collection has an ATC Simulator as well from around 1985: https://github.com/vattam/BSDGames/tree/master/atc
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by s-macke 2mo ago
Kennedy Approach was published around the same time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_Approach
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by s-macke 2mo ago
Ask a coding agent to decode the assets. Works pretty often for such old games.
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When Washington switched off Fable/Mython 5: What happened, hour by hour(twitter.com)
3 points by s-macke 3mo ago|0 comments
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by s-macke 3mo ago
What I find fascinating is the fact that you can implement those few lines in an esoteric language such as FRACTRAN or Game of Life and even boot Linux on them. Seems doable now. In theory.
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by s-macke 3mo ago
Yes, I’ve tried it. For example, this was my winning entry from a year ago [0]. The LLM only performs trivial obfuscation, not advanced transformations. For example: if (x == 1 || x == 2) { ... can be transformed into: if (!(2+x*
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by s-macke 3mo ago
Here is the video: https://www.youtube.com/live/MoWCwZx1Swc?si=eIOlRsKWNKRVRZeB...
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by s-macke 3mo ago
Yes, you haven’t tried it. LLMs are actually awesome at deobfuscation, but terrible at obfuscation. They just can’t do it yet. They also lack the creativity needed for those entries. Obfuscation is only one part of it. Coming up with the id
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by s-macke 3mo ago
My favorite is the 366-byte C program emulator that can run Linux and Doom [0]. The VM implements an OISC - a One Instruction Set Computer [1]. [0] https://github.com/ioccc-src/winner/blob/master/2025&#x2
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366-byte C program emulator can run Linux and Doom – IOCCC29 winner(github.com)
6 points by s-macke 3mo ago|1 comments
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by s-macke 3mo ago
This VM implements an OISC - a One Instruction Set Computer. More information: https://github.com/ioccc-src/winner/blob/master/2025/cable/R...
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IOCCC29 Awards Presentation and Source Code Reveal [video](youtube.com)
1 points by s-macke 3mo ago|0 comments
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by s-macke 4mo ago
Because I haven't found the special case in the disassembly for these "flying" objects. Probably I misinterpret the object coordinate somehow.
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by s-macke 4mo ago
Sorry, the maps are rendered in 3D so that you can fly around. I can of course make top-down screenshots of the maps. Thanks for your feedback.
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by s-macke 4mo ago
Author here. The Ross’s Game Dungeon video was, to some degree, a motivation for me to start the reverse-engineering process, just for fun. The analysis took place over many years, and I figured out 95% of the format myself. AI helped me th
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by s-macke 4mo ago
I wish I had known this two years ago. I ended up writing my own embedded connection struct to trace these things [0]. type Connection struct { net.Conn OnEventCallback func(clientClosed bool, serverClosed bool, err error) }
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by s-macke 4mo ago
On weekends, yes. During the week, that’s also true if they arrive within a short time frame, e.g., three minutes. Almost no one looks at “New”. That is the real issue.
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Show HN: I reverse-engineered the world maps of Test Drive III (1990 DOS game)(github.com)
215 points by s-macke 4mo ago|56 comments
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Abstruse Goose Comic Archive(github.com)
3 points by s-macke 4mo ago|0 comments
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by s-macke 4mo ago
Author here. Yes, it is integral. I chose this approach to first show how to draw it from back to front, because the code is easier to understand this way.
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by s-macke 6mo ago
Nice to see an MCP integration here as well. In my experience, coding agents are great at analyzing MOS6502 code. Because the code is limited to only 64 kB, it does not overwhelm the agent. And in parallel it can write specs and even extrac
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by s-macke 6mo ago
Exactly. And JSLinux is using one.
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by s-macke 6mo ago
Most such emulators have Internet access on the IP level. Therefore, this is a very cheap way to test anything on the Internet. apk add nmap nmap your.domain.com However, the speed is heavily throttled. You can even use ssh and
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by s-macke 6mo ago
To reverse engineer old C64 games using Coding Agents, I built a CLI and MCP flow disassembly tool. The agent can search the disassembly, provide annotations, manage symbols, and reinterpret code and data. [0] https://github.com&
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by s-macke 7mo ago
AI is very effective for reverse engineering. Unless you’re doing it purely for fun, it makes sense to use AI where it helps. I’ve tried to visualize the “navigate and modify” process you mentioned in [0]. It’s mesmerizing. Because reverse
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by s-macke 7mo ago
About halfway through my reverse-engineering process, I came across those documents and realized that roughly 50% were missing. I searched pretty much the entire web to see if anyone had stored these files elsewhere, but so far I haven’t ha
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by s-macke 7mo ago
Some early source code snippets of the game have even survived and can still be found on archive.org [0]. By today’s standards, they’re almost unreadable. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20030906124225/http:/&

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