https://github.com/thenickdude/PetzA Here's a mod that allows the player to do debug-level stuff in the game. I have always been fascinated by this kind of stuff. Maybe I'll recreate my own small version, just to learn.

 

I'll compile a small reading list on the subject also. What's interesting is how there's vastly more resources for this than for something like digital forensics. (from what I saw)

https://www.starcubelabs.com/reverse-engineering-gba/ - I'd be interested in understanding romhacking further.

https://www.starcubelabs.com/reverse-engineering-ds/ - same but for a DS game

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/y8hb6z/wrote_a_blog_post_about_work_i_did/ - Cracking the compression algorithm for a DS game. Also people seem to like OP's writing style, I should take some notes.

https://medium.com/@valeriy.krygin/reverse-engineering-a-videogame-part-1-know-your-tools-7906f9bd0e3e some article idk I want to check it later

https://github.com/kovidomi/game-reversing - general basics

https://ssno.cc/posts/reversing-tac-1-4-2025/ - CoD anticheat analysis

https://connorjaydunn.github.io/blog/posts/denuvo-analysis/ - Denuvo Analysis. There seems to be a lot on the subject

I'd also be interested in finding material for more complex and modern games, too...

Maybe I should be putting an effort to backing up all that data in a personal library or something... Could be useful.

While trying to find a reverse engineering report to imitate, I stumbled upon these lovely malware analysis writeups. They have screenshots and everything so might be good for reference.

https://github.com/itaymigdal/malware-analysis-writeups

 

This seems decent formatting wise. https://vaktibabat.github.io/posts/Analyzing_A_Trojan_Horse/

I can imagine how much easier it's now to get into reverse engineering or get things done with tools like claude code.

Absolutely tbh

If it weren't for llm's I'd spend much more time trying to figure out what is going on

Still just Junk

If buying isn't owning then pirating isn't stealing.

Pheww, okay, so I spent the entire day digging around with the debugger and ghidra and whatnot and it caused a headache so strong you wouldn't believe it. Picrelated: my honest reaction

The problem I was trying to solve right now was trying to figure out how to enable unicode in the game. I want to use cyrillic + extended alphabet (some languages use this)

assembly&x32dbg are so hard for me to navigate now it's unreal

In the end I finally found the parser function and figured it actually reads the file by 1 byte at a time. I did not find the parser for unicode (not sure if it exists yet)

So... Basically we can only use symbols from 00 to FF now. Which is 256 symbols. Which is why it crashes when we convert translationkit.txt to utf.

What's interesting is the russian version of petz is not in unicode it's just ANSI with windows 1251 or something, I don't know the specifics, this is just how it is.

 

SO I guess we just gotta do codepage remapping now. (basically replace one letter with another) I always knew this was a thing but I really believed I could just easily enable unicode here lol. I cant even begin to imagine how arabs deal with all this localization bullshit.

 

Fuck the police

All Cops are Bastards.

First, a cool story: www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjFBaGr1xgM

A hacker reverse engineered gta5's poor loading times. The reason was that during online load the game read json for shop items, but it did it really poorly - it loaded the file again and again each read. Rockstar eventually reached out to him and granted a bounty of 10,000$. Very cool.

 

As for my project, I made some progress today. I am going to try to change the game via DLL's, ship it with a modified font and all that. I made my first ever DLL and managed to inject it, but now the hardest part begins, how the fuck do I plunge in my edited font there. Like it's probably not enough to load it so???... Honestly I expected a localization project to be much, much easier.

 

Edit: I have also been tracking down the text pipeline, yes. It's very elaborate for a simple kiddie game, but I suppose I expect no less from the team that pioneered that weird ballz artstyle of theirs. I actually love it. I think engineering wise petz 5 is quite cool, (hell according to other modders it has some sort of genetics system) it's just that it's a bit empty content wise.

Current progress

Feels like magic's

replaced font to impact

I STILL don't quite understand what is going on. I wanted to write a report but this would be too mentally taxing

 

Also there's a problem

Sometimes the hook function (where I replace the font) does not run at all... some caching issue perhaps?