Reverse Engineering Star Wars: Yoda Stories (2014)

Those four letter chunk IDs seem suspiciously like IFF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_File_Format) in which case there's a bunch of generic parsing/extraction code out there which will avoid a lot of reinventing the wheel here.

Really great article. For anyone interested, I built a somewhat working reimplementation of the whole game at https://www.webfun.io/

Reverse engineering the world generation algorithm and internal scripting language were especially challenging.

I remember doing similar things over 20 years ago with games that had poor customization. Open up the binaries, search for strings, and replace strings with custom text (e.g. character names etc). I learned quickly that I had to keep the string replacement the same length in order to fit with the byte boundaries otherwise the game would crash.

But this author has taken reverse engineering to a whole new level, not just finding where text resides, but being able to parse out entire images (maps etc) by finding patterns in the binary representations. Truly Jedi Master level.

I remember someone did this and found a Corvette in the sprites that was never used. Mark Hamill in Corvette Summer. A joke.

For another SW game being reverse engineered see TheForceEngine.GitHub.io

The project is reversing the Jedi Engine from "Dark Forces" and "Outlaws". The fan doing it is clearly talented and a former game dev.

Fond memories of Yoda Stories and Indy Desktop Adventures, had no idea they reviewed so poorly.

This was incredible