Reverse Engineering Instruments’ File Format | Hacker News Reader

Reverse Engineering Instruments’ File Format

jamie-wong.com

87 pointsphleet8 comments

Early in my career I had reverse engineered the DBF desktop database format (XBASE), and used that info to write programs in both Pascal and C (at different times) to read and print the metadata and data of DBF files. Later did the same in Python as part of xtopdf, my Python toolkit for PDF creation from other data formats. It was an interesting project for a relative beginner. Good fun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBase

xtopdf overview:

http://slides.com/vasudevram/xtopdf

DBFReader.py code:

https://bitbucket.org/vasudevram/xtopdf/src/default/DBFReade...

It's interesting that you didn't look at the binary that created this file and tried to reverse engineer it that way. If you're still looking for more, I'd suggest going through Instruments.app/Contents/Frameworks/InstrumentsAnalysisCore.framework/InstrumentsAnalysisCore.

For a lot of people (myself included), it's easier to look at the output and try to pull it apart than it is to read x86_64 assembly.

binwalk is a good tool to use for this, especially early analysis: https://github.com/ReFirmLabs/binwalk

Putting "Instruments" in quotes would help. It's some program for Apple computers here. This is not about figuring out what measuring instruments are sending on the wire, something that's often proprietary.

HN headlines are often terrible like this. People take an existing word as the name of their product, and if you're not deeply involved in whatever niche this new gizmo occupies, you're left to click the article just to figure out what the "Crystal 0.25" headline refers to.

I got excited because I was recently looking at the binary format produced by the venerable Stanford Research SR785. I concluded that programming its GPIB port is easier.

I was expecting musical instruments (and was confused, since I assume they'd just be MIDI)

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