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Reverse Engineering MineSweeper
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."
It's a lot of effort to go to just to cheat at Minesweeper. I find it easier to type "xyzzy" followed by enter, shift+enter. Then look at the top-left pixel of your screen.
Can't I just edit the winmine.ini file if I wanted the fastest/highest time/score?
:)
kidding
Chewie does not get a medal. Come on, George. Can a Wookie get a medal?
I'd prefer a game of MimeSweeper, but maybe that would work better as a FPS or god game.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Years ago, I worked somewhere, and a colleague had reverse-engineered Hearts (Windows 95), and created an executable that modified the Hearts executable to enable and disable a cheat, that allowed any card to be played, not just legal cards.
;-)).
In typical Microsoft fashion, the other players' clients (and the server) accepted the illegal cards without problems.
That was kinda fun to use on unsuspecting colleagues during the break (though I used it just to make them go WTF? once or twice
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
There's also a good article on hacking minesweeper here
Input error. Replace user and press any key to continue.
Minesweeper is NP-Complete, which is basically a haughty way of saying "it's probably very difficult, but if you can prove whether it is or not, there's a million bucks in it for you"
[another interesting link on the subject]
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.
Dude! You have the enter and shift+enter backwards. was getting really angry with you until I did some investigation.
You type "XYZZY" then press shift-enter and Enter.
Unless it's different on different versions of Windows.
(WinXP SP2 here)
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Doesn't make it any less enjoyable, though. :) It's not totally luck though, good players will consistently get further than poorer players, because they can see the "I know two of these four are mines, and three of these five are mines, therefore this one cannot be a mine!" moments better. The players who know to use both mouse buttons simultaneously to clear areas do better as well.
I find that many Minesweeper players think of it as a race against time, so I'm just pointing out it's enjoyable as a test of quantity as well. Start at full size, 100 mines, and work your way up.
So if a MS employee was caught reverse engineering code, it's ok? I realize it's a stupid game, but it's against the EULA and potentially illegal as well. Damn hypocrites.
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.