zachtronics, being the nerdsniping master he is, wrote a "reverse engineering walkthrough" because he hates that i have free time sometimes
to make things niftier, i've been following along in a language i'm bad at
soon, i'll conquer you, lisp!
elisp code
oh, i did write a thing to make hexl measure ranges, in case anyone besides me ever needs to do that:
(defun hexl-measure-region ()
"Measure how large the active region is."
(interactive)
(when (region-active-p)
(save-excursion
(let ((point (hexl-current-address)))
(exchange-point-and-mark)
(let ((diff (abs (- point (hexl-current-address)))))
(exchange-point-and-mark)
(message "Range is %d bytes (0x%08x)" diff diff))))))
aaaand i've successfully managed to extract images from this binary, like in the post!
i'll work on the palette later, but this is really cool!
i've always wanted to learn how to reverse engineer and analyze data, so i'm super-grateful this exists!
it really helps see what the mindset behind it is--plus doing it in another language just solidifies the hands-on part of all of this
success!
though admittedly the palette wasn't in the data file, so i couldn't follow along the extraction of it--it's just a big vector without reason
the way i wanted to *try* and find the palette and extract it turned out to be correct though! it just wasn't anywhere i could possibly do that
i also wrote the flags for each tile into their filenames, since there's no other way to express them meaningfully right now