bbayles

6 ms·

31.
by bbayles 2y ago
Fantastic game! The same development studio, Sega AM2, recently had a developer reveal that he had put an Easter egg into Fighters Megamix for Saturn. However, he mistakenly introduced a crash bug in it. This set me off looking for the East
32.
by bbayles 2y ago
Excellent - these seem indeed to work. I'll try to figure out what they do. I'll write up the results eventually. I sent you a note about crediting your contribution here. Many thanks!
33.
by bbayles 2y ago
Wow, nice work! The other missing ones are: A75CA25CF4498F87 8FE0C6AA7CE60CEC B343B58CF0B72493 E0B20BEDFA0AC685 EFCC5A6FD62EC6D8
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by bbayles 2y ago
Really cool! I'll play with this to see if I can come up with some missing hashes for Tony Hawk 3.
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by bbayles 2y ago
If you feel like a challenge, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 has some hashes with unknown inputs. The function is the same as the one in the article, and one target is 1eca8e89ad2dc1d6.
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by bbayles 2y ago
Good point - the dictionary attack produces some permutations that are too long, but it doesn't matter because you get the effect as soon as the final character of the correct code is entered.
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by bbayles 2y ago
Yeah, for sure. It's as expensive to generate the permutations as it is to do the hashing in this case!
38.
Attacking the hashing function in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2(32bits.substack.com)
50 points by bbayles 2y ago|14 comments
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by bbayles 2y ago
I knew some from school, but stepping through a debugger with a video game that I remembered from childhood was a better education on computer engineering than anything I got in class.
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by bbayles 2y ago
Thanks! I didn't clock that - should have looked at the decrypted values!
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by bbayles 2y ago
A friend of mine explained that there are overlapping phobias of water and deep dark spaces that this game triggers; he said it's unbearable to play the later levels.
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by bbayles 2y ago
I've poked around a bit with that game! The main trick is to import the memory snapshot (various ways of dumping it to a file; people like Cheat Engine for this) into Ghidra. Ghidra can analyze the SuperH processor machine code nativel
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by bbayles 2y ago
The programmers for this game were in Budapest, so this is a good guess!
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by bbayles 2y ago
It really is a game with a strange mix of aesthetics. Blue skies and bright colors in the early levels; suspense and dread and supernatural stuff in the later levels. Another Ed Annunziata game called Three Dirty Dwarves is also stylistic
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by bbayles 2y ago
Yeah, exactly! I took a couple memory snapshots of the name "AAA" and then threw out all of the addresses that had values that didn't match the first snapshot. Then I changed it to "BBB" and threw out all the addres
46.
Using Ghidra and Python to reverse engineer Ecco the Dolphin(32bits.substack.com)
458 points by bbayles 2y ago|134 comments
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by bbayles 2y ago
I've used Geany for 10+ years on Linux and Mac. Very similar to Notepad++!
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by bbayles 2y ago
I've been having some fun lately reverse engineering the "password" systems that some console games used prior to memory cards and backup RAM. Some are very straightforward - just an encoding of which level you were on, your
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by bbayles 2y ago
How about a service that lets bruteforcers "in" after some number of failed attempts, but what they get is just a fake command prompt that accepts all of their commands? I'm sure hackers would eventually adapt, but it would a
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by bbayles 2y ago
The story you're thinking of is about Leonhard Euler, though it may not have actually happened (see Wikipedia on Euler).
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by bbayles 2y ago
What did they do prior to 1984?
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by bbayles 2y ago
I had a coworker who could really Go Fast in Excel, and by watching him, learned enough tricks to be able to impress onlookers by flying through computations with keyboard shortcuts. From my perspective, it's gotten harder to use sprea
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by bbayles 2y ago
It's also possible that the firm is being trolled by the "threat actor."
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by bbayles 2y ago
The screenshots of the chat logs are really something. This firm claims to be in communication with the actual criminal, and the actual criminal says that using their firm would have helped prevent the breach. I have updated my sense of the
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by bbayles 2y ago
I love doing this kind of stuff - it's endlessly engrossing to me. Lately I've been trying to find previously undiscovered cheat codes in 1990s console games - there are lots that never made it into the magazines! (Findings are on
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by bbayles 3y ago
There's a Saturn game called Thunderhawk II that has a password system. Part of it includes XORing one of the buffers with the string "NOSEY GIT", which I took to mean they were chiding me for trying to snoop on the system.
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by bbayles 3y ago
There are lots of cool things like this to discover in Sega Saturn games, in large part because people are intimidated by the notoriously difficult SH-2 assembly language. However, the Saturn surprisingly has really good tools for reverse e
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Unlocking hidden features in prototype demos of Saturn Bomberman(32bits.substack.com)
2 points by bbayles 3y ago|0 comments
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by bbayles 3y ago
The headline makes me raise my eyebrows. We're deriving "mad" from this anodyne statement? > The NOI’s undue focus on affordability—or pricing—is particularly inappropriate. The linked ArsTechnica article describes this as
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by bbayles 3y ago
I've been writing up my findings here: https://32bits.substack.com/ So far I've focused on the Sega Saturn because it is notorious for having a difficult-to-understand assembly language (SH-2). That means there ar

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