Zach, here. There's actually an open source project called Sigrok that's compatible with a ton of logic analyzers, including the one-chip knockoffs from China.

http://sigrok.org/

Your second scenario sounds pretty cyberpunk too! I'd certainly love it if more people purchased our games, but piracy is unavoidable. I'd rather have a Russian 12-year-old pirate our games than never get a chance to play them.

Absolutely! Are there any games you'd like to see in particular?

Nothing in particular.

I love reading RE posts but I don't plan on making any mods to any games in the near future. Therefore I don't want to specify any 'targets' for your efforts unless I'm willing to extend them :)

I was talking about something big and sophisticated, like Crysis or Battlefield (from the top of my head). I'm under the impression they have something more than uncompressed bitmaps and 8bpp resolution but I've never done anything like this to be certain.

Thanks! Keep up the good work.

The CryEngine documentation would be a good start for Crysis http://docs.cryengine.com/display/SDKDOC1/Home. Battlefield would require some reverse engineering since it runs on Frostbite, which EA's internal game engine, and not publicly available.

I'm wondering whether there are any Android games that'd use custom formats or whether lots use off the shelf engines.

I've always had a passing interest in game reverse engineering - I remember the days when "ripper" applications had a good chance of pulling the music out of a game.

I would love to see something like Football Manager, it's perfect for data extraction, I think, as it's largely a game of data.

I know a few programs are able to read the data, such as FM Genie Scout (Watch out if you download, it's filled with adware) and FMRTE (Paid only).

I would be very interested to see this happen. I'd like to get into RE but don't know where one would begin. Having an example from a modern game might give some nice pointers to start working on the games I play and love right now.

personally, its not games, but approaches to getting information from games

finding / latching onto a rendering call and shooting the inputs to that call off to a separate file to export market data from a game, was one of the more interesting approaches I've heard. But how someone managed to work that out is beyond me

Holy crap, that's absolutely the same car. I'll update the writeup with your discovery. Thanks!

I guess the two tiles are really unused, aren't they? If they are, that's great stuff for the The Cutting Room Floor wiki (http://tcrf.net)! Don't get lost on there as it's somewhat like TV Tropes.

In your page update, Mark's family name should read Hamill.