Opening GE exes

[Troodon]

Hi,
I've heard that some companies and experts can "open" and view the script of some exe files made by for example Visual Basic. How possible it is to experts to read an exe made by GE? Could someone for example open a file and check a string variable value from it? Or read algorithms from the file and forecast what the program does? Thanks

[Fuzzy]

To know more, you want to research de-compilers, hex editing, code profiling... wikipedia would be a good start.

[Troodon]

But I don't know how GE packs those ged files into exes. Thanks for the keywords by the way, I didn't think about them because english isn't my first language.

[Fuzzy]

An exe is an exe, for the most part. there are traces that show what compiler made them though. With modern compilers, they are getting more and more standardized, so it should be harder to determine what langauge was used to create.

I guess what you should know is that the exe only contains part of the data. your operating system doesnt need to keep the names you used for variables and such. You can get a idea for this by comparing the exe to the ged it was made from. the GED should be larger.

[Troodon]

Ok, thanks Pete.

[Fuzzy]

Its really fun to edit the exes and try to change things though. I used to be pretty good at it as a teen, but with windows and modern OSes, they are a lot more complicated.

[motorollin]

When you export your .ged it will be converted to C/C++ code and then compiled in to a binary. If you want to convert it back to code then you would need to look in to a C or C++ decompiler.

Decompilers are often specific to the compiler that created the executable. This is because the examine the platform-specific machine code and translate it back in to readable source code. So you would need to ask Makslane what compiler is used by GE for whichever platform your executable runs on. Assuming he wants to tell you, you could then try to find a decompiler to match.

Even if you can get the executable decompiled, you would end up with C or C++ source code, not a Game Editor .ged file. So unless you know how to programme in C/C++ this would not be very useful to you.

[Troodon]

Well, I wasn't thinking reading exe files myself. I just tought that if I store a solid password inside a exe file, maybe somebody could easily find the password by just putting my exe in C or even in raw binary.

[Fuzzy]

Nope. Otherwise Windows would be open source.

On the other hand, that was the basis for cracking game codes years ago. We had to look up a page in a booklet based on a page number given by the game at start up. That would be checked against a list in the exe or possibly a different file.