2023 October Retrospective

While last month was the month of the Nun II, this month turned out to be the month of 30 Coins.

It’s been a long time coming due to all the things that have went down in the past few years. However, as expected it started out strong and with a bang.

I didn’t realize until about two or three years ago that I’ve been missing out on a lot of amazing series coming out of Spain and Italy, to name a few in no particular order since they are all terrific:

• El Cid
• The Mess You Leave Behind
• Feria
• Romulus

If you do decide to bite and watch any of them, please do so with subtitles, dubs take the soul out of highly original productions like these, regardless of how skilled the actors who do end up dubbing them are. It’s just the nature of the beast.

Did I just turn into some movie/series aficionado all the sudden? Is this my version of a mid-life crisis?Far from it, I always been a huge movie/series buff, or at least ever since I can remember; I just never ended up talking about it extensively until relatively recently.

Reverse Engineering Series

In other news, I thought that I’d bring back a topic that I really spent a lot of my time with, many many moons ago, well a life-time ago now to be more precise, which is reverse engineering.

Why now? Well, the 20th anniversary of Dino and Aliens by Nevosoft will be coming up shortly, and it’s really the perfect target for a reverse engineering series. No compression, no obfuscation, no anti-debugger tricks, just pure love compressed and contained in a few megabytes.

It’s a tiny and super fun shareware game from 2004, which is pretty much abandon-ware now without any way to buy it anymore, at least not officially, but the 60 minute trial (demo) version is still available, and that’s what I really need anyway for such a series.

I looked at it a few years ago and wrote a tiny packer and unpacker for the package file format it uses, but never really went any deeper than that and this month I thought that it might just be what the doctor ordered to vary things up even more. Turning on the heat, aren’t I?

Now of course, as you very well know as an avid reader of this blog that I always rotate between several projects at any given time, so this will just yet another one. As a result, do not expect any precise time-lines or dates. It will be up when it will be ready to be up, no promises.

I just thought that I’d make a formal announcement since the idea of doing this as a 20th anniversary thing made me all fuzzy and warm inside.

This will also serve as the perfect opportunity for me and Ghidra to get to know each other a little bit better.

Hey, cutie snek! Too cringe? Okay, I know where the door is.