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Questions tagged [reverse-engineering]

The process of determining how a device was made. Usually for the purposes of replication.

19 votes
2 answers
4k views

Do people fix software bugs in old arcade games?

Do people fix software bugs in old coin-op arcade games? Here is one list of arcade game bugs. Presumably the ROM images that run on emulators like MAME allow reverse compilation. This would allow ...
user2023370's user avatar
23 votes
6 answers
4k views

How can I reverse-engineer the game Wizardry (1981) for PC, based on UCSD Pascal?

I am looking at the files included with the 1981 game Wizardry. The particular version I have is from a 1998 re-release, but I do not know if the binary is still the original 1981 release. My ...
typedeaf's user avatar
  • 333
5 votes
1 answer
530 views

Reverse engineering an old 40-pin connector

I found a 40 pin connector on the side of one of my old electric typewriters. There is zero documentation of this plug online or in the owner's manual, and I want to figure out what exactly it can do. ...
UberRix's user avatar
  • 51
4 votes
1 answer
357 views

Can anyone help me identify what 6803/6303 development tools might have been used to build this program?

I've been doing some hobby work reverse-engineering vintage synthesizer ROMs from the early 80s, and I'm curious about what kind of development tools the original engineers may have used. Normally ...
ajxs's user avatar
  • 844
3 votes
0 answers
243 views

How do you jump to an absolute address in a SNES ROM, in IDA Pro?

I used to know more about the SNES memory mapping than I do now, apparently. I'm using a combination of bsnes-plus (a debug oriented fork of bsnes) and IDA pro in an attempt to figure out something ...
AlphaCentauri's user avatar
2 votes
0 answers
364 views

Trying To Understand DOS Game Assembly Instructions [closed]

I am trying to understand assembly language instructions, for a DOS Game. I have looked at the following Link :- https://atrevida.comprenica.com/atrtut07.html reading about how VGA Graphics work in ...
Edward Winch's user avatar
10 votes
3 answers
979 views

How can I make the Microsoft C compiler for DOS emit a loop with an intermediate jump to continue?

I am trying to recreate the exact C source code from some 16bit DOS 8086 assembly generated by the MS C 5.0 compiler. After making some progress, I've hit a wall with the following code (annotated in ...
neuviemeporte's user avatar
10 votes
2 answers
3k views

Is there a common name for this 'switch' like 6800 assembly routine?

I've been reverse-engineering a 6303/6800 binary from the early 1980s, which includes a subroutine for jumping to one entry in a table of relative offsets in memory, based upon whether the value of a ...
ajxs's user avatar
  • 844
8 votes
1 answer
685 views

How to make Microsoft C for MS-DOS emit an immediate-target far call into the data segment?

I am trying to recreate the C source code from some 16bit DOS 8086 assembly generated by the MS C 5.0 compiler. I've hit a wall with this far call instruction. 0000008D 9A2F0CB506 call 0x6b5:...
neuviemeporte's user avatar
16 votes
1 answer
3k views

Did Digital Research clean-room MS-DOS?

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS DR-DOS (written as DR DOS, without a hyphen, in versions up to and including 6.0) is a disk operating system for IBM PC compatibles. Upon its introduction in ...
rwallace's user avatar
  • 63.1k
15 votes
2 answers
2k views

What information was "off limits" to IBM PC clone BIOS authors?

Back in the PC clone days the accepted legally defensible method of selling a non-IBM PC BIOS was using a "clean room" whereby an engineer who had never been exposed to proprietary IBM ...
640KB's user avatar
  • 1,357
8 votes
2 answers
760 views

Reverse engineering an RS-422 protocol with access to only one device?

I have a console, but not the main computer it's designed to connect to. My goal is to interface this with a (Linux) PC, and hopefully more than just the keyboard. I have never tried something like ...
noughtnaut's user avatar
6 votes
1 answer
426 views

Dump process memory of Windows 3.1 control panel applet

I'm trying to work out how a Control Panel applet on Windows 3.1, which interacts with some host-specific hardware, works and as part of this I'd like to dump the contents of memory which the process ...
David Gardner's user avatar
3 votes
1 answer
559 views

Loading a Tandy CoCo or a Dragon 32 machine code program from cassette with multiple "name blocks"

For the Dragon 32 and the TRS-80 Color Computer I've found two documents describing how loading from cassette tape works:Dragon 32 doc, CoCo doc. They both say that a standard program consists of a ...
hippietrail's user avatar
  • 6,918
14 votes
3 answers
2k views

How are Amiga Kickstart Relocation Files (.RTB) created?

Examples of Amiga Kickstart files (ROMs) can be 256k (1.2/1.3) or 512k (3.0/3.1) binary files, located at $FC0000-$1000000 or $F80000-$1000000 Several programs are able to "soft-kick" Amigas, i.e. ...
Jean-François Fabre's user avatar

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