ghidra-scripts VS unmaintainable-code

I've got no experience with reverse-engineering executables, but I got a bunch of code-like stuff showing up when I fed ULTIMA.EXE to Ghidra and told it to analyze it with all the flags set.

The whole game is written in C++ (game logic intertwined with graphics). Ghidra can help you deconstruct the game binaries, but you need to put in a GREAT great effort to even get a starting point. Cheat Engine has been successful for some purposes, including an AI enabling utility for multiplayer (use with great care!).

Ghidra: https://ghidra-sre.org/, https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra

What I think you’re talking about is reverse engineering. It’s basically taking a program and analysing the compiled code to attempt to find out how it works. It’s a fairly expansive topic, and fairly tricky to do but look at anything to do with Ghidra to get started.

Oh also just as an aside Ghidra is a really cool free tool developed by the NSA which can reverse engineer software by looking at its executable and recreating the C code from the instructions and static data within. It's another way to get familiarized with the relationship between C code and the instructions it compiles to.

There exist decompilers and other tools for helping make sense of assembly and that can automate some of the conversion back to higher level languages. In my brief involvement with Slippi I used Ghidra - a tool developed by the NSA, to do some of that kind of work, which I found a little amusing.

It's likely a binary file that's improperly being interpreted as Unicode by the text editor. If it's an executable file, you can use Ghidra to disassemble and analyze it. There may also be some interesting ASCII strings that would reveal its purpose. My guess is that it's a Windows version of Unix "tee" program which will write stdin to a file and stdout simultaneously.

On the other hand, this slick "Ghidra" webpage looks suspicious. It's probably written in Typescript on Electron!

Many useful lessons can be learned on what not to do: https://github.com/Droogans/unmaintainable-code

Reminds me a bit of this old gem - How To Write Unmaintainable Code

I think it can be true for coding, but in this line of work some people can output in 2 hours and 50 mins what other people require a week to do. Also it is possible for someone to create more work through their actions - a sort of anti-work (not to be confused with the subreddit). Sometimes the anti-work can create entire worker-years of work. Actually, anti-work is sort of an art form - here is a guide: https://github.com/Droogans/unmaintainable-code

This is the future of the classic essay 'How to write unmaintainable code': https://github.com/Droogans/unmaintainable-code

Two thoughts:

* This is ridiculous. Why would you do this? Which made think of this quote: "Which is ridiculous and unnecessary but when has that ever stopped programmers?" from one of my favorite Tom Scott videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gocwRvLhDf8

* How to Write Unmaintainable Code: https://github.com/Droogans/unmaintainable-code

My go-to is this one: https://github.com/Droogans/unmaintainable-code

Here's a handy style guide for how to write proper code.