in reply to Is code related to reverse engineering appropriate?

I think it depends on whether it is legally or ethically allowed to generate that kind of file. For example, it's definitely approperiate to post something that generates, say, a winword document (though how useful that is might be a question because it's easier to generate RTF), whereas, say, generating a registration key that allows you to use multiple copies of a payware without paying for it would not really be approperiate. (There can even be borderline cases. Eg. with the builtin cheat key combinations in Prince of Persia you can't get more than ten life or so, but if you edit the save file you can get up to 255. Is it allowed to cheat that way to practice dueling with Jaffar?)

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Re^2: Is code related to reverse engineering appropriate?
by Zen (Deacon) on Jul 16, 2009 at 12:57 UTC
    There used to be a product called Game Genie when I was a kid that you plugged your cartridge into in order to cheat.
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      Here goes my two cents.

      My buddies and I used to figure out how to make money cheats and sometimes other sorts of resource cheats for simulation games like SimCity and SimEarth. It'd be fun to play the game with limits on all your resources, but it could also be fun without such limits. Sometimes it's just nice to see if you can do better with unlimited cash, or to bulldoze and rezone an entire city to see what the game does. It's not really so much "cheating" when you're not playing an opponent. It's just exploring a slightly different game from what shipped. Half the fun was seeing how quickly we could find and decipher the data in the saved game files.

      I do think that aimbots, resource cheats in multi-player games, unhiding hidden game elements like enemy troops, and such is pretty cheap and unethical. Well, unless the game you're playing is stated to be open to such manipulations to see who can twiddle the game system's bits the most effectively anyway. I do like the occasional explicitly free-for-all cheaters' server at a LAN party apart from the very strict no-cheating server.

      Stealing, cracking software to steal a copy, defeating DRM to steal content, and stuff like that I strongly frown upon. Breaking DRM or cracking software to make something you've already bought more convenient to use with your own systems I condone.

      Reverse engineering a file format for the sake of compatibility is not only useful and in my eyes perfectly acceptable. It is also sometimes absolutely necessary to ensure that you can make proper use of your own data. I can't count the number of times over the years I or a client of mine had older data for which no known suitable software was available for a contemporary operating system. Indeed, sometimes it's even necessary to get at data that's from an OS you no longer have working hardware to run. Without reverse-engineering the formats or using information from someone else who has, you'd lose anything that wasn't in an openly specified format from the beginning. This is why there's such a push for openly specified formats these days, so that most data won't cause these problems for people in the future.

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      Wouldn't you get electrocuted and pass out? And then your wife calls ambulance and they all laugh at you?
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