Hey again. I have a few game formats that I cam trying to reverse-engineer. I know how to read/write from/to binary files, as I have made a Q3 md3 loader. How would I go about reverse engineering the file format? Say, for instance, that I want to take a model file from an old game called "Battledrome" and display it in my OpenGL program. I know that in the Quake III md3 file, there is a header that tells how many mesh files there are, etc. But, I only knew this from a website that had allready reverse engineered it (previously mentalvortex, but the site is down now). How did he know that there was going to be a header? How did he know how many floats/strings/ints there were going to be in the header? Basically, can anyone tell me about reverse engineering or point me in the right direction? -Thanks --SkyFire360

it requires a lot of guesswork and trial and error (like solving a jigsaw puzzle) if u have multiple instances of a fileformat it makes decifying easier , see where they are the same see where they differ. see what byte patterns are repeated etc

http://members.xoom.com/myBollux

the is a program on the internet called softice this program must run under pure dos
i dont know the link anymore but if you like I can upload the program so you can download it later when i''ve uploaded it

http://playtools.cjb.net/ - All the Reverse Engineering tools you need. Links also.

http://protools.cjb.net/ - Programming tools and links. Check out the links section for some infos on Reverse Engineering

Get a good hex editor.(AXE, or HIEW, something of the like.)
Pick up WinDASM, and Numega''s Softice.

Best of luck.

im guessing that those are disassemblers where are gret for turning a binary into assembly but for a data file eg md3,bsp thats gonna be no help

http://members.xoom.com/myBollux