Nice work!

I reverse-engineered a lot of the file formats for the game F-15 Strike Eagle III and documented them here (and didn't even finish documenting everything I figured out), but it turns out not many people remember that game, so I didn't bother going on to actually mod it. Maybe one day I'll find just one person who would be interested in such a thing; perhaps if I'd done all of that 14 years or so earlier - when the game was actually new - it would have helped! 😁

More recently I've found things to reverse-engineer which even fewer people are excited by - various old document file formats and related things: DynaText; WordCruncher; HyperReader/HyperWriter; table of contents files for Microsoft TechNet/MSDN. I actually found people who'd be interested in HyperReader/HyperWriter though, so I ought to finish that off and publish the code!

doshea wrote on Yesterday, 11:58:

More recently I've found things to reverse-engineer which even fewer people are excited by - various old document file formats and related things: DynaText; WordCruncher; HyperReader/HyperWriter; table of contents files for Microsoft TechNet/MSDN. I actually found people who'd be interested in HyperReader/HyperWriter though, so I ought to finish that off and publish the code!

Believe it or not, people will thank you even if they use your tools someday and have no idea who you are. Just think about how many tools you use today to work with old systems, documents, etc... What you are doing is important work. Lots of stuff is locked up in those old file formats; business data, designs, stories, etc... People will take your tools for granted, of course, but some tasks would have been impossible without you.

Not to mention that the skills you learn by doing this will be invaluable to you later. I use the skills I developed doing game modding almost daily in my work (legacy aerospace engineering) where documentation has been lost decades ago and I need to reverse engineer firmware payloads. I saved a multimillion dollar contract (and avoided a lengthy and very costly redesign) earlier this year by reverse-engineering such a system and developing new means to package data for an old weapons management system (semi-classified stuff, so I can't get too detailed.)

Heck, there is currently a $30M effort in California to get their subway system off floppies and (humorous to me) talk about how difficult and expensive it is because none of the engineers they can hire understand these "old" systems, floppies, etc... (have they ever heard of gotek drives?)

I have a couple of really cool looking Smith Corona Word Processors (PWP 5400 LR) which allowed for running custom applications from 3.5" disk and I have been wanting to reverse engineer them to figure out how to make my own custom applications as well as swapping the spreadsheets/documents to a windows system. The hardware and specs are pretty much identical to a Macintosh. My current limitation is finding any examples of the original software/applications to reverse engineer.

I did forget one other game example: that same friend was into Hentai games and one particular series was based all on the same engine. I had created some tools for him to translate the games to English. Not a huge effort except for the requirement to patch the files without disturbing the original code.

I had also did some work translating some foreign graphic adventure games and recently some C64 software that was only available in German.