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?

How the Russian version is localized: it straight up uses entirely different versions of fonts, specifically Arial -> Arial_Cyr

Now, I was confused by this at first because you can't just replace a string that's too short.

So, I guess the natural assumption is this is a different build? (meaning the source code was directly modified..)

I was so mystified how they did it at first, like were they reverse engineering, but probably no.

 

I did try searching for empty 00 spaces but couldn't find them.

Also I hear apparently you can add additional PE sections with data? big if true.

Honestly I don't really get direct exe patching yet so I'd rather stick with my dll now.

for reference

Not sure how much /reverseengineering/ this is at this point, but I'm gonna add some more details about what I did yesterday.

Originally, my goal was to translate the game to a language that uses cyrillic and 4 extra letters (therefore, 8 extra symbols)

I decided to mod the original English build.

Now, Petz can only scan 1 byte at a time as I saw from researching the function that reads translationkit.exe. It processes text as 1 byte at a time. Therefore, we cannot use unicode. Seems like the program is using ANSI.

But, Windows ANSI code page has a lot of extra symbols, not just the alphabet and the numbers. (pic1) It has 256 symbols I'm pretty sure.

I decided to replace 0x80-0x88 symbols with the ones I need. Where? In a .ttf font.

But this means I would have to type these symbols to make them show up. (pic2) I guess I'll translate first and then use "search and replace". I also replaced the extended latin symbol with cyrillic.

The in-game result as follows on pic3.

Now, you can see the text is kinda fucked up, it's because ttf's have offset info for letters which I have to fucking fix now. Oh well.

I'm also a bit concerned about the exe strings but if we're using the new font it shouldn't be a problem I think... Maybe I'll skip them though idk.... or I will have to make yet another hook fuckkkkk

 

 

This also means I will have to go into detail of HOW we're going to load the .ttf into the game. I tried looking into exe editing, etc etc, but DLL seemed the easiest. But I don't understand it well enough yet so I will write a report sometime in the future.

Interestingly, I also learned a word for a phenomen that I have known ever since I was a kid. If your first language is one that doesn't use purely Latin, or perhaps if you tried running an old Japanese program, you might have encountered it before.

 

Mojibake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake

 

Basically back in 00s and early 10s the text would end up garbled if we used the wrong encoding page. For example, here's me changing encoding from Cyrillic to Japanese.

🤔