I cannot believe this completely unsupported fan-made utility from 1997 is failing to work on modern windows
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@foone I reverse engineer malware, which I don’t exactly love because they have moved way past obvious checks based on one branch (as, of course, have some legitimate developers). It’s getting harder and harder. If more of those malware authors lived in different countries, they could easily get jobs making anti-piracy stuff. But now that I’m thinking of it as repeated endless software cracking…maybe this seems more fun??
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@kaced
see that's the nice thing about hacking games from 1996: they're way back in this arms race. Shit is barely protected at all!I need to get into that malware reverse engineering, though. It may be less fun, but it's far more likely to get me paid.
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@foone I love that your first response here appears to be to hack on old software to get model rendering working rather than just focusing on reverse engineering the format itself
I know that if I were in your shoes I'd be just trying to figure out how to extract a vertex list from the file and I'm not sure if I'd be very successful
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so I don't have (and can't find) any docs for these two formats, but I might have something that'll work:
I have the renderware DLLs for the game's version, right? Presumably the game is calling whichever Renderware functions it needs to read out that file.I could just write a little code to call them myself, then inspect the in-memory structures it returns.
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@gfaster yeah, I have spent a LOT of time staring at hex editors in my years, so my ethos is to get the program itself to do stuff for me. if it can open the files, I make it do that, and I pull out the results.
I find it a lot faster than the more traditional "look at the file until it makes sense" method. -
oh hey, GTA 3 uses RenderWare (presumably a later version).
That was reverse engineered, I wonder if the RE source interacts with renderware? maybe they made some tools for this. -
note: open source reimplementation of RenderWare.
GitHub - aap/librw: A re-implementation of the RenderWare Graphics engine
A re-implementation of the RenderWare Graphics engine - aap/librw
GitHub (github.com)
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that could be neat to patch into the old game.
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I don't see anything useful in the GTA RE. (at least the one that's still on github. I think one got DMCA'd out of existence. I'll check it too)
There's some warezed copies of the renderware SDK on the internet archive, but they seem to be significantly newer or significantly older than the one this game uses.
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yeah the "RenderWare(R) v1.3 JMP Evaluation Release" is from 1994, so obviously it doesn't have Win95 support, which'd be needed for SoulTrap.
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might still be close enough for looking up structure definitions and such. the 2.0 that SoulTrap uses might be similar to 1.3 except ported to win95
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Foone🏳️⚧️replied to Foone🏳️⚧️ last edited by [email protected]
hah, while looking for RenderWare stuff, I found a disc called the "Virtual Reality Homebrewer's Handbook" from 1996.
It's got BRender files on it! Small world.(for context, I helped get BRender open sourced)
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now I gotta go check out this disc just in case these brender files are useful.
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Nah, same BRender demos we've already got.
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The Renderware stuff is a renderware demonstration program that doesn't run (through winevdm) on win10.
I don't have a win95 VM locally... maybe it'lll work enough over RDP to see if it has any useful files -
Foone🏳️⚧️replied to Foone🏳️⚧️ last edited by [email protected]
forgot to link it:
Virtual Reality Homebrewer's Handbook CD-ROM : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
From the readme.txt on the CD: This CD accompanies the book The Virtual Reality Homebrewer's Handbook, by Robin Hollands, and published by John...
Internet Archive (archive.org)
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@foone did you forget again
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@foone 40 years ago, I cracked EasyWriter for PC-DOS using DEBUG.COM by replacing one instruction with NOPs. The copy protection was of the classic "read a sector on the floppy that shouldn't exist" flavor (don't remember if it was tricksy formatting or a physical hole in the disk) but I just stepped through the initialization until I saw the INT 13 and I could see what it was doing.
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@beka_valentine yes
(actually my clipboard fucked up) -
@wollman awesome!
