Static analysis of an unknown compression format • Hacker News Board

Re: Static analysis of an unknown compression format

#11

Post by PaulHoule » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 9:28 PM UTC

Funny, I was just about to start playing "Tales of Symphonia" when I read this...

Re: Static analysis of an unknown compression format

#12

Post by ZephyrP » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 11:34 PM UTC

I think this overlooks the classic technique of reverse engineers all over, IDA Pro!

Re: Static analysis of an unknown compression format

#13

Post by maximilianburke » Sun, Apr 08, 2012, 12:16 AM UTC

That's a fairly common compression technique on PS3 titles. Breaking the file into regularly sized chunks about 64kb (for lzma) permits decompression of the file in parallel on the SPUs as the dictionary and decompressed data can fit entirely in local store.

Since optical drives have terrible seek times and low bandwidth most assets are stored compressed on disc.

Re: Static analysis of an unknown compression format

#14

Post by tripzilch » Mon, Apr 09, 2012, 6:33 PM UTC

aw3c2 wrote: post #2

Is there any tool to generate bitmaps from binary files? For example using each byte as grey value and letting the user specify the column width. Or with more than one byte and then using color. Wouldn't this be a trivial and somewhat useful thing to see structure in binary files?

Both GIMP and Photoshop can read any binary file as a "raw" file format, where you can specify the bit-depth (e.g. greyscale, RGB, RGBA, etc) and column width.