codeblog code is freedom — patching my itch

August 28, 2005

porrasturvat hacking

Filed under: Reverse Engineering — kees @ 2:14 pm

Three years ago, when I first saw tAAt’s Porrasturvat, I couldn’t stop playing it all day. It’s a really simple game: see how much “damage” you can score to a stick figure that you push down the stairs. It’s basically a physics simulation that tracks force and impact of a body falling down a flight of stairs. So much fun. I hope they make it skinnable. :)

At the time (2002-11-12) I had asked for source code in the hopes of helping to port it to Linux. I got an email yesterday in reply to my request. This sets the record for the longest reply-time on a email, ever. :) Jetro was letting me know it was available for Linux now, so I immediately downloaded it and started playing again. This version is much more stable and lacks any scoring glitches (that I’ve been able to find), so it’s a real challenge to get a high score.

Even in the original game, I had wanted to push the figure backwards off the stairs to see what kind of damage would be done just from having him fall straight down. This time, I’m determined to practice some binary analysis skills and locate the place in memory where the “Force” value is kept so I can tweak it. So far so good, I’ve been able to locate the damage accumulators for the various body parts. Now it’s a matter of just tracing the changes back through the execution paths. Here’s my million-point game:

damage mod

© 2005 – 2015, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

1 Comment

  1. I should qualify my “longest reply” statement: Jetro *did* reply originally to me 3 years ago. I was just amazed that he kept my email around and took the time to reply _again_, 3 years later. (The “In-Reply-To” header was intact!) I should say “longest running correspondence” instead of “reply”. :)

    Comment by kees — August 28, 2005 @ 8:00 pm

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