So You Want To Be a Hacker? Part IV: Compression Formats

Posted by Edward Keyes on July 27th 2006 to Production Process, So You Want To Be a Hacker?

Game data archives almost always employ some type of compression for their contents, and sometimes will even mix and match different algorithms for different types of files. Understanding the typical compression formats is therefore crucial to the success of a game hacker.

Moreover, you need to be able to recognize the common algorithms just from their compressed data alone, so when you’re staring at hex dumps, you will know how to proceed. In today’s installment, we’ll go through some of the most popular formats, how they work, and how you can recognize them “in the wild”. (more…)

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