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Comment by c7DJTLrn | Hacker News Reader

I started reverse engineering a game about 3 months ago with no prior experience. It is insanely difficult. I like to think that I have very good pattern recognition and investigative skills, I find most problems surmountable given enough time. But I'm barely making any progress and am tearing my hair out just to find tiny breadcrumbs of clues. Maybe this is one of those things where picking up a few books is imperative.

In software development, we share massive amounts of information, and there's always a premade tool out there that does what you need and will work the first time. This isn't my experience in the reverse engineering world. Information is sparse, seems to be kept private, and there's not always a tool that does what you want. Even if there is, good luck getting it to work.

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I wanted to do the same a few years ago. I didn't even reach that point, as I was interested in doing 90s games. Pretty much every game I tried was compiled with watcom, which ghidra doesn't know, so cannot apply any tricks when analyzing. Watcom even has its own calling convention which ghidra doesn't understand, so the pseudo C code for most functions was almost useless. Already gave up at that point.

The best way to do this is to code yourself some game, view it's assembler in your preferred IDE while doing step-by-step/trace into to familiarize how its instructions are executed at CPU level. Then do the same in Ghidra. After a while, all of this during the process of coding the game to completion, you'll be able to pickup fairly easily different patterns in assembler which will make you more productive at reverse engineering.

I did this with a Tetris clone, then a Minesweeper clone and then I did a multi-threaded "Shoot the ducks" clone, each duck being a thread. Probably will take you several months but at the end you'll really be able to do a lot of RE.

There are ton of docs on the subject of rce. What about tuts4you or Woodmann board?

It depends on the game you are trying to work on. If the game has protections, then it does not make sense to make that your first game to analyze.

It doesn't, just a little obfuscation in certain functions. Some parts of that I already know how they work from other people/prior work. I don't think there is a better candidate actually, besides a tiny DOS-like game written in C, but the game I'm looking at is something I'm actually interested in.

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