re-posel

Reverse engineering Posel Smrti/The Black Mirror (2003)

About

This repository contains tools for reverse engineering and analysing the game The Black Mirror, first released as Posel Smrti in Czechia in 2003. The bulk of the work was done by analysing the agds.exe binary in Ghidra and by analysing the datafiles packaged with the game. The latter are in a bespoke format (with light XOR-based "encryption") and also contain bytecode.

Features

The analyser tool, implemented in Rust, can:

• extract assets from *.grp files: these are simply big archive formats with no compression;
• extract objects (strings, dialogue scripts, references to assets, screen regions, bytecode scripts) from *.adb files;
• analyse and visualise objects: references to objects and assets are resolved, bytecode is decompiled into readable script;
• patch *.adb files to fix or modify game behaviour.

The tool requires you to provide paths to the original data files.

Patches

By default, the patch command will apply all of the following patches:

• chapter_select: allows the player to choose a starting chapter (I. - VI.) when starting a new game;
• check_again: removes dialogue paths where the same person has to be asked multiple times before the game progresses (currently only done for dialogue with Harry);
• skip_intros: skips intro logos and menu animation on launch, quits faster.

Goals

The main reason I am doing this is because I enjoy reverse engineering, and this game is close to my heart.

Other than that, some goals I hope to achieve are:

• patch game to avoid wasting player's time
  • skip game intros
  • re-enable chapter selection
  • ask a person three times before plot is advanced:
    • Harry, waiting for Mark
    • waiting for Frederick... (extra annoying because of horizontal scroll?)
    • ...?
  • avoid Sierra-style deaths and unwinnable game states
  • double click to instantly move, even across horizontal scroll screens
  • unskippable animations before dialogue is started
• find optimal routes in the game for speedrunning (look at that thriving community)
  • create Autosplits https://github.com/LiveSplit/LiveSplit.AutoSplitters
• recreate game engine in Rust
  • run natively on more platforms
  • higher resolutions (scaling filter...?)
  • allow mixed language audio and subtitles
• make video content about the game
  • find cut content (e.g. VA instructions in dialogue scripts)
  • explain how game works
  • find differences between English and Czech versions