Show HN: Kirby's Dreamland 2 level viewer, in JavaScript | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Kirby's Dreamland 2 level viewer, in JavaScript

ecc-comp.blogspot.com

40 pointsfallat19 comments

I was really pleased with the vgrep technique he used at the start to figure out what changed the map data. I often forget just how awesome our eyes are at spotting changing stuff at a glance and small datasets don't take long to manually look at.

Simply open the working RAM and look at it; lo and behold the thing is right there.

(There's some super spiffy things built on this idea, the one I was really excited to see come out was ..cantor.dust.. [0], which was never released.)

[0] https://sites.google.com/site/xxcantorxdustxx/

EDIT: formatting

Whoa.

I can't tell if this is a joke, or 100% serious. I'm trying to find a download link because damn this looks cool. Thanks for sharing.

Totally for real, but a bit of a vaporware. You can get a demo version from this reddit thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/comments/1izity/...

Now we reverse engineer the reverse engineering tool and create an open source version that can hook into /proc/mem and other streams instead of just files :)

We changed the URL to this one because it tells the story. The submitted URL was http://github.com/lf94/kdl2viewer. Both are great.

Could you add some screenshots or GIFs to the readme, to give a sense of how it works for people who don't have a ROM handy?

This is a much interesting link: http://ecc-comp.blogspot.com/2016/03/reverse-engineering-kir...

Has some screenshots too.

Yeah, document.org in the repository is a reflection of that post.

A friend of mine helped me setup gh-pages for this, so now you can use it right away :)

http://lf94.github.io/kdl2viewer/

Looks like the compression is a variant of LC_LZ2, used in lots of Nintendo games: http://www.smwiki.net/wiki/LC_LZ2

>Kirby's Dreamland 3 for SNES, except it's rare and worth at least $80

I have that game, always loved playing that game, and am surprised to know it's now worth at least $80!

How did you dump the rom?

Chances are he didn't. Verified dumps are all over the internet.

However, a sufficiently motivated individual can create cartridge dumpers with hardware like Arduino and a broken Game Boy (to harvest the socket for convenience). The cartridges for most/all game systems are widely understood by this point thanks to the efforts of reverse engineers.

Of course there are also pre-built dumpers available through various sources. They are not unique to the present-day. Even when the SNES and Game Boy were still selling on shelves, there were devices created specifically for copying cartridges to alternative storage such as floppy disk or custom cartridges.

Why?

Conveniently, section 1.1 of the current link [0] covers this (it's one of the earlier sections).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11300075

Why not? Learning how things used to be done is interesting. With reverse engineering in particular, it feels a little like software archaeology and being the first one to see something in decades.

Objectively, it's probably not worth the time, unless you do a lot of embedded programming. Subjectively, there's no accounting for taste.

Rundown? Can you use that in a sentence?

run·down

noun

noun: rundown; plural noun: rundowns; noun: run-down; plural noun: run-downs

ˈrənˌdoun/

    1. an analysis or summary of something by a knowledgeable person.
    "he gave his teammates a rundown on the opposition"

I think it the parent meant to reference Oscar in "the Office"

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