EV NOVA PILOT FILE LOCATION EDIT MAC OS
EV NOVA PILOT FILE LOCATION EDIT CODE
EV NOVA PILOT FILE LOCATION EDIT MAC

arg1: The size of the data to encrypt/decrypt.

The 3 arguments in the function are as follows: That’s fine, we don’t technically need them, they just make it easy to read.

EV NOVA PILOT FILE LOCATION EDIT CODE

To be fair, I’ve written the code in much the same way many of the original variables are gone thanks to the original compiling of EV Nova. Being the result of a disassembly and decompilation, it is annoyingly cryptic and difficult to follow. The actual encryption algorithm is listed below. In addition to finding the _LoadPilotData routine, I also ran it through Hopper’s decompiler. I’m using it to reverse engineer parts of EV Nova itself. This is a Hopper Disassembler, and it is used for investigating the contents of application binaries. The routine inside EV Nova responsible for Loading Pilot Data This means that the only way to deal with it was by reverse engineering EV Nova itself. As far as I can tell there is zero documentation about this encryption online, or at least zero surviving documentation. As you can see this is not easy to actually look at… even unencrypted binary data is not easy to look at, but this is especially not easy to look at.

EV NOVA PILOT FILE LOCATION EDIT MAC

This means that liberal use of SheepShaver (a PPC emulator, for Classic Mac OS) is required. The API’s required were deprecated 10 years ago, and do not function correctly under 64-bit. Nothing on modern macOS will allow us to look at the contents of a resource fork easily.

EV NOVA PILOT FILE LOCATION EDIT MAC OS

The Contents of a Pilot File Good old ResEdit and Mac OS 9 to the rescue On top of that, if we parse the resources using these structures the data is completely garbled and insane due to the encryption. Yep, both resources have a different format internally, which means they can’t be read with exactly the same process. NpïL – 128 “Pilot Data” – structure NpïL – 129 “Ship Name” – structure I have attached two screenshots beneath of the code structures representing the two NpïL resources. However I can not currently find it, so not able to link to it. There is a document online covering the actual data layout of the pilot resources (I believe by guy).

The second issue is that the resource data itself is encrypted.

Thankfully the macOS virtual file system provides us a “hack” to read the resource fork as a data fork (though who knows for how much longer).

The only API’s that can are the Carbon API’s. This is a problem as none of the Cocoa or POSIX API’s can open or read from the resource fork data. This is illustrated by the fact that when we drop the file in to a hex editor, we see no content at all, despite Finder reporting an 87KB file size. This means that the actual NpïL resource is inside a true resource fork. For whatever reason AmbrosiaSW never migrated this particular file to flattened ndat files.Before we get into how this resource can be read, we need to first understand some of the complexities and issues with it. One of the more irritating resources to deal with is the player data resource, or the NpïL resource.

Ev nova pilot file location edit