Binary File Format Engineering and Reverse Engineering
summary
Covers how bits become numbers, text and floats, then shows real encodings used in practice: two's complement for negatives, protobuf varint and wire types (example decodes 42 and two strings), and compression primitives LZ/RLE/Huffman. Uses file and strings to reverse engineer a 1993 game: finds an index table, identifies 2048 shapes, decodes nine‑byte and 16‑byte records, implements decoders for run‑length image runs and level blobs, and renders full levels from 64 files — the extractor works and reproduces original images.
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chapters (23)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:35What are bits
- 1:17Conventions
- 10:43Variable Length
- 13:43Protobuf
- 17:19Compression
- 24:28Encoding
- 26:46Data transforms
- 28:46Variable length codes
- 38:10Bitpacking
- 39:11Questions
- 39:26Why not to make binary files
- 40:38Types of binary files
- 43:38Header and flat files
- 44:28Index and data files
- 44:41Record sequences
- 46:27Chunked files
- 48:50Use cases
- 50:43Working sets
- 55:15Logical Use Cases
- 57:04Finding the Data
- 58:11Using the Data
- 59:37Grouping the Data
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