[HN Gopher] Hacking a 25 Year Old Game to Make It Work [video]
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Hacking a 25 Year Old Game to Make It Work [video]
Author : gus_massa
Score : 179 points
Date : 2023-11-12 00:45 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| suprjami wrote:
| This guy is awesome, some of the most friendly and accessible
| Reverse Engineering content you'll ever see.
| cyberbolt23 wrote:
| Love this very cool explanation. Sort of guided puzzles solving
| tour.
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| This was delightful. The theme brought back memories of trying to
| bypass copy protection on old games. And the chap doing it
| explains it beautifully.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| He just casually reverse engineered and fixed one of my favorite
| games then proceeded to find and patch back in hidden features.
| Wow. I love that the first comment says the next step is the
| network code because that's what I expected him to do next before
| the video ended.
|
| But then he actually did it:
|
| https://youtu.be/utEx3ZvPd8Y
|
| Without any captured traffic to analyze. Badass.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| The game is Worms 2.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Thanks - I wish this trend of burying every detail behind an
| abstract low information headline would end.
| jvm___ wrote:
| <Shocked face looking at normal background with a leading
| title...>
| mr_sturd wrote:
| Thank you very much for this link. This guy looks to do a great
| job of demystifying reverse engineering. Will be subscribing in
| the hope of learning something!
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| I didn't follow too closely when watching the video, so pardon me
| if it's already answered in the video: did he end up hijacking a
| different button for opening multi-player dialog? I assume there
| is no way to recover the removed multi-play button since the
| sprite (?) was already removed?
|
| Also I'm surprised not only they removed the multiplayer button,
| they even centered the remaining one.
| devstar wrote:
| I could be misremembering since I watched the video on its
| initial release day. I believe the sprite asset was still there
| and he was able to restore the original button.
| lobf wrote:
| Correct
| randomh3r0 wrote:
| Reminds me of the unsung hero who was selflessly patching and
| fixing AOE2 for many many years before the AOE2 HD stuff on
| steam. These people are awesome.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Looks like the main blocking problem was that the game was stuck
| in a loop looking for a multimedia system DLL that was missing,
| because it assumed there would always be a CDROM available. OP
| lucked out that the code that called winmm.dll had a GitHub link
| and he could just patch it.
|
| Too bad Microsoft has kind of softened and lost its reputation
| for Windows's impeccable backward compatibility. This seems like
| it could have been easily avoided on the OS side.
|
| I'm currently trying to get _Distant Worlds: Universe_ (which is
| less than half as old as Worms 2, no excuse Microsoft!) working
| on Windows 11. Same problem: No start, no error message. I 'll
| try some of the tools and techniques highlighted in the video!
| goosedragons wrote:
| It's always been a slow rot. Even in the XP days you'd run into
| issues. I remember Alpha Centauri did NOT like my dual core
| Athlon and it wasn't even a decade old at the time.
| j1elo wrote:
| If this was a web service, the popular solution would be
| Docker!
|
| But the joke might make more sense than it appears. Just like a
| server that was coded to work on a given version of Red Hat or
| Debian, wouldn't be expected to run without changes on modern
| versions 10 years later, I guess we shouldn't expect old games
| to run without a VM that replicates the system they were
| written to run on.
| default-kramer wrote:
| Very cool.
|
| I wonder if this kind of work is something that LLMs will be good
| at someday. (Has anyone trained an LLM on machine code yet?) Is
| it reasonable to hope that 20 years from now you'll be able to
| say "Hey CodeGPT, this binary doesn't run on Windows 17, can you
| make a patch?" The deep understanding and creative thinking that
| Nathan Baggs demonstrates here seems far beyond the capabilities
| of any tool I'm aware of; on the other hand, even a relatively
| dumb AI supplemented by brute force might be good enough.
| 95014_refugee wrote:
| You need to be able to explain the goal sufficiently well, and
| then you need something goal-seeky to do the work, i.e. a
| closed-loop system.
|
| LLMs are impersonators. They take a prompt and then make up
| something that relates to the prompt based on their corpus -
| they are open-loop systems in that sense.
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(page generated 2023-11-13 23:02 UTC)