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Reverse engineering Skifree

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206 pointstodsacerdoti103 comments

The Gameboy Color of all platforms has a great port of Ski Free: https://www.mobygames.com/game/microsoft-the-best-of-enterta... There are even solid ports of 2D Duke Nukem and Commander Keen games for it too.

I'm kind of surprised modern Microsoft/Xbox hasn't leaned into their retro past and brought back some of these old entertainment pack classics. Like a modern 3D SSX style Ski Free, modern GORILLA.BAS (with full port of qbasic as an Easter egg of course), or a 3D Hover! remake but with top tier modern 3D visuals, etc. Heck I bet you could even make fun abstract games out of old Windows 95 screen savers and their visuals.

edit: A wario ware clone with frantic mini game challenges cribbed from old Microsoft DOS/Windows games is the ticket. Imagine blasting down a hill in ski free, getting eaten by the monster, then jumping to a round of GORILLA.BAS, smashing into Encarta and having to quickly find a specific topic, etc. and navigating it all through a Bob style home interface while CANYON.MID plays and it randomly glitches into hot dog stand colors if you fail a mini game. Poorly digitized Bill Gates in a trench coat with toy shotgun is the end boss of course. :)

Foone is an absolute treasure. Everything they do is pure gold, I swear.

This is a pretty interesting toe-dip into basic Ghidra usage / Win32 reverse engineering, also highlights some of Ghidra's pitfalls.

Yeah, it's great as an intro tutorial. I wish ghidra fixed some of those issues, or at least surfaced the choices it made so they can be manually fixed. It's like the uncanny valley where it's typically so good that annoyances really stand out for me.

We're all programmers? Ghidra is open source. Have at it?

And we also have work, family, hobbies and other open source projects we work on. So unless you want to take over one of those for me, I don't have extra time to work on Ghidra as well.

Sure I'll take on your hobbies, maybe the family (if good) so you can work on Ghidra ;-) Ok, that's silly, I get your point but maybe put your feedback on their github at least.

Nothing wrong with sometimes "wishing" things without contributing. Yes it's useless chit chat but...

It's a convoluted Java codebase that likely nobody outside of the NSA fully understands. Publicly released early 2019, 184 contributors according to GitHub but a signifigant portion of the contributors only have a couple of commits with most of them being typo fixes or minor bug fixes (likely the result c+p fails or typos in the first place - not major logic flaws). The regular contributors are likely NSA employees.

A detailed description of every step of the reverse engineering process! That's amazing. Ghidra is such an awesome piece of software. I found it to be much easier to use than radare2. I wonder if there are similar process descriptions for the latter...

> you owe me at least 5$ if you read this thread coming from the orange hellsite, that's all I'll say.

> 20$ if you commented on the site about how this should have been a blog or a livestream.

Well, at least I didn't make a comment about the latter. $5 well spent - that sort of threads is really the thing that both entertains and educates.

Converted to a single page for easier reading: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1536053690368348160.html

Lacks the latest updates.

https://nitter.net/Foone/status/1536198126691790848#m

There's a link at the bottom of the page "Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh."

I really enjoy in depth posts like this.

Feel like it would be easier if he rewrote it from scratch and then copied the business logic

Well, you can do it and write it up. I'm sure it will be interesting too.

Foone uses they/them pronouns.

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