decoding files

[MasterGoon]

would it help if I gave some more on what I am doing? I am trying to de-encrypt the scores file for the game MXMania, I wan't to make a score recording program. I have tried looking with a hex editor, and I find the names of the players, but the laptimes are still scrambled. Help?

[kedaman]

they are probably stored binary, you could backup the score file, then try getting a new score and see what changes. You probably need to read the section in either integers or longs with get statement, that is if it's not encrypted.

[MasterGoon]

if i couldn't get it with a hex editor, isn't it encrypted? how do i go about reading the binary, im new to this.

[HarryW]

A hex editor will show you what the hex values are, but not necessarily the decimal values. If it's any more than a very basic app though, it will probably have encrypted them a bit.

[MasterGoon]

so what code should i use to read it in?

[kedaman]

Open file for binary as 1

  get#1, POSITION, VARIABLE

close 1

POSITON is the position from which you read, the first byte in the file is 1, the last is the length of file, can be retrieved with Lof(1). You have to either check out what bytes are changed, or try guessing by looking at the numbers (get the decimals of the hex) or you could try putting your own changes and see what happens to the table.

VARIABLE. Here you put either a long (4 bytes) or a integer(2 bytes) to get the score. If you can't find any pattern at all with the return values, it could be encrypted, and then you can't do anything about it.

[MasterGoon]

I will try that in my boring old high school pascal class this morning. lol.

[MasterGoon]

how do i get the string values of the players names?

[kedaman]

you place a string as variable, use space() function to prebuffer its size if you don't use a fixed length string.

strName=space(LengthOfIt)

[MasterGoon]

checking it out

[MasterGoon]

ok, its obviously encrypeted, all it returned was "¤RB", lmao, how do i de-encrypt?

[MasterGoon]

c'mon guys, i need help!

[HarryW]

Well I guess you either (A) figure out the encrypt/decrypt algorithm, (B) give up or (C) get the scores out of memory before they are encrypted. You'd probably need to use pointers for that though.

[MasterGoon]

had my code wrong, lol, got it for now

[oetje]

Mastergoon, you can upload it to my ftp server. So, people can look at the file.