3 ms·

It depends how much you like reading a whole ton of X86 assembly language, with all the variable names replaced with numbers. Something that looks like the UI

It depends how much you like reading a whole ton of X86 assembly language, with all the variable names replaced with numbers. Something that looks like the UI code has its source included with the game, so there's some info to be gleaned there. Also, any interfaces to external libraries would be fairly easy to trace. Still: Very difficult, due to the size of the binary (21MB), and the level of painstaking attention to detail that's necessary to reverse-engineer a program from its binary. Automatic decompilers exist, but they're fairly limited, and you'd still have the issues of meaningless variable names, even in the best case.

rtpg 10y ago
Emscriptem has a "loop detection" feature, I wonder if you could apply that to the binary...
- khedoros 10y ago
  One classic way to handle it is to load the binary into IDA Pro (a graphical disassembly suite). That starts from the entry point of the binary and traces through as much of it as possible, noting the locations of strings, function calls, the state of the stack when functions are called, different segments in the binary, etc. It'll allow you to view the code in blocks connected by lines, which indicate branches and loops. As a dev, you can go through the code then and start working things out. With some investigation and the context of where you are in the program, things slowly start falling into place, and you can start putting names to different functions. Although...Dwarf Fortress looks like it was compiled with GCC 4.5, so I'd expect things to be pretty difficult to read, just because of non-obvious optimizations made by the compiler. I've always thought it would be useful to have a debugger that logs all the locations that data is read from or written to during execution, and which addresses were executed as instructions. Just play the game for a while to try to get some good code coverage, and import the data as extra input into IDA (probably you'd have to write your own plugin for that too).

rtpg 10y ago

Emscriptem has a "loop detection" feature, I wonder if you could apply that to the binary...

khedoros 10y ago
One classic way to handle it is to load the binary into IDA Pro (a graphical disassembly suite). That starts from the entry point of the binary and traces through as much of it as possible, noting the locations of strings, function calls, the state of the stack when functions are called, different segments in the binary, etc. It'll allow you to view the code in blocks connected by lines, which indicate branches and loops. As a dev, you can go through the code then and start working things out. With some investigation and the context of where you are in the program, things slowly start falling into place, and you can start putting names to different functions. Although...Dwarf Fortress looks like it was compiled with GCC 4.5, so I'd expect things to be pretty difficult to read, just because of non-obvious optimizations made by the compiler. I've always thought it would be useful to have a debugger that logs all the locations that data is read from or written to during execution, and which addresses were executed as instructions. Just play the game for a while to try to get some good code coverage, and import the data as extra input into IDA (probably you'd have to write your own plugin for that too).