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Reverse Engineering MineSweeper

Posted by Zonk on from the mine-hacking dept.

hdm writes "The first edition of the Uninformed Journal introduces reverse engineering by ripping apart the MineSweeper game included with Windows XP. This paper covers the basics of the Windows Debugger and steps through the entire reverse engineering and cheat code development process."

3 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Building a MineSweeper player? by Sparr0 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That has nothing to do with difficulty, thats a purely luck-based setup. With most minesweeper boards there will come a point where you have to pick one of two equally probable positions for the remaining mines. One of them will be wrong and lose the game, the other will be right. In "easy" games that happens rarely. In "medium" it happens sometimes. In "hard" it happens often enough that the game SEEMS hard, but its really just you coming up against 50/50 odds one more time than your luck held out.

  2. Re:But we already know the cheat by MagicDude · · Score: 2, Interesting

    IIRC, the game is set so that the mines are distributed after you choose your first spot, ensuring that you never die on the first move. Makes sense, since in all the years I've played Minesweeper, I don't ever recall having hit a mine on the first try. Just to test this out, I made a custom game with a 10x10 grid and 81 mines (I tried 99 mines, but 81 seems to be the max for these dimensions). After about 20 games, I have yet to hit a mine on my first try.

  3. Re:AOL was the same way by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    That's nothing compared to the old days when AOL charged a per minute fee. Turns out the only security on their service was client side. With a small program you could get AOL for free by causing the client to lie and claim you were in a free area such as account status. Even worse, the only thing preventing anyone from accessing the employee only areas such as the customer database was the fact the AOL client wouldn't let you use the keyword (similar to a domain name) normally used to access that area. All you had to do to get access to the entire customer database including all the credit card numbers was request access to that area directly with another program rather than use the AOL GUI. That's right, if you could send the right data yourself you could do anything on AOL that an employee could.