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Reverse Engineering Instruments’ File Format

jamie-wong.com

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Re: Reverse Engineering Instruments’ File Format

#3

Post by vram22 »

Early in my career I had reverse engineered the DBF desktop database format (XBASE), and used that info to write programs in both Pascal and C (at different times) to read and print the metadata and data of DBF files. Later did the same in Python as part of xtopdf, my Python toolkit for PDF creation from other data formats. It was an interesting project for a relative beginner. Good fun.

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

xtopdf overview:

http://slides.com/vasudevram/xtopdf

DBFReader.py code:

https://bitbucket.org/vasudevram/xtopdf/src/default/DBFReade...

Re: Reverse Engineering Instruments’ File Format

#4

Post by saagarjha »

It's interesting that you didn't look at the binary that created this file and tried to reverse engineer it that way. If you're still looking for more, I'd suggest going through Instruments.app/Contents/Frameworks/InstrumentsAnalysisCore.framework/InstrumentsAnalysisCore.

Re: Reverse Engineering Instruments’ File Format

#5

Post by LambdaComplex »

Animats wrote: post #2

Putting "Instruments" in quotes would help. It's some program for Apple computers here. This is not about figuring out what measuring instruments are sending on the wire, something that's often proprietary.

I was expecting musical instruments (and was confused, since I assume they'd just be MIDI)

Re: Reverse Engineering Instruments’ File Format

#6

Post by voltagex_ »

saagarjha wrote: post #4

It's interesting that you didn't look at the binary that created this file and tried to reverse engineer it that way. If you're still looking for more, I'd suggest going through Instruments.app/Contents/Frameworks/InstrumentsAnalysisCore.framework/InstrumentsAnalysisCore.

For a lot of people (myself included), it's easier to look at the output and try to pull it apart than it is to read x86_64 assembly.

Re: Reverse Engineering Instruments’ File Format

#7

Post by sleavey »

Animats wrote: post #2

Putting "Instruments" in quotes would help. It's some program for Apple computers here. This is not about figuring out what measuring instruments are sending on the wire, something that's often proprietary.

I got excited because I was recently looking at the binary format produced by the venerable Stanford Research SR785. I concluded that programming its GPIB port is easier.

Re: Reverse Engineering Instruments’ File Format

#8

Post by myself248 »

Animats wrote: post #2

Putting "Instruments" in quotes would help. It's some program for Apple computers here. This is not about figuring out what measuring instruments are sending on the wire, something that's often proprietary.

HN headlines are often terrible like this. People take an existing word as the name of their product, and if you're not deeply involved in whatever niche this new gizmo occupies, you're left to click the article just to figure out what the "Crystal 0.25" headline refers to.
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