how to edit an exe compiled by metacard(a cross platform too [Archive]

10-24-2003, 08:01 AM

I have to say I had not heard of it, but it looks rather interesting from a coding perspective. From a reversing one too ;-D
From what I see, it creates a different version for each platform.. Which would mean you might luck out if it uses normal resources (meaning you can use the standard tools). Then again, I assume you've already tried that, and noticed they didn't work. In that case, there's the much less pleasant option of it using its own homemade format, for which there are no tools yet that I know of. If you would want to break it, the first step would be trying to figure out how the program is constructed, what is where (code, data, resources?) and so on. Then, figure out how they are stored, which will result in you also knowing how to change them.
It says the program code is compiled by the way (meaning it uses standard instructions which run directly on the CPU instead of emulating their own homemade ones), which means the actual executable code is the same (nice to know, means it both runs faster and is easier to edit)
But since you said you wanted to edit the resources, someone is headed for a serious reversing session, to find the images and such amongst the other data (Unless, of course, there are already tools for this, which I doubt ;)

-kw

WhyKing

11-05-2003, 03:16 PM

Little while ago I worked with one application made with metacard and got impression that it's just programming/scripting language interpreted on fly. You can find its code as plain text on memory, just dump it and cleanup garbage. Didn't inspect how it's stored but if I had to guess I would bet it's somehow compressed on exe or somewhere else. Seems like some code is stored also on programs metacard stack files (would bet this is application specific).