Author Topic: Why is profiles.dat a binary file?  (Read 6108 times)

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Offline slyoneTopic starter

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Why is profiles.dat a binary file?
« on: October 20, 2014, 06:40:05 PM »
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I did a hexdump of profiles.dat and see a bunch of nulls in addition to the name of each of my profiles as well as a couple of the settings I chose for the profile.

Why is profiles.dat a binary file?
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Offline Boydon

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Re: Why is profiles.dat a binary file?
« Reply #1 on: October 21, 2014, 01:30:04 PM »
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Right now I don't have the code to look at it, but by heart I can tell you that profiles are internally handled as records and those records are serialized when they need to be saved and de-serialized when Stelath need to load them.

Serializing is much more easy than to define your custom file format and the write code to handle it. ;)
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Offline Crome969

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Re: Why is profiles.dat a binary file?
« Reply #2 on: October 21, 2014, 09:53:39 PM »
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Quote of the Headdeveloper :
Quote
21 Oktober bei 7:58 :
because read&write of fixed-size records from binary file directly to structures is fastest))

Offline Boydon

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Re: Why is profiles.dat a binary file?
« Reply #3 on: October 22, 2014, 07:22:19 AM »
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Quote of the Headdeveloper :
Quote
21 Oktober bei 7:58 :
because read&write of fixed-size records from binary file directly to structures is fastest))

This is what I said, isn't it? :)
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Offline Crome969

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Re: Why is profiles.dat a binary file?
« Reply #4 on: October 22, 2014, 11:12:56 AM »
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Quote of the Headdeveloper :
Quote
21 Oktober bei 7:58 :
because read&write of fixed-size records from binary file directly to structures is fastest))

This is what I said, isn't it? :)
And i asked Vizit0r to verify it ;D

Offline slyoneTopic starter

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Re: Why is profiles.dat a binary file?
« Reply #5 on: October 22, 2014, 05:30:25 PM »
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Thanks for the info!  Now, unless you can reveal this record, time to get to work on reverse engineering what the record looks like...
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Offline Boydon

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Re: Why is profiles.dat a binary file?
« Reply #6 on: October 23, 2014, 12:32:15 PM »
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Problem is you'd then have to reverse the standard Delphi serialization algorithm.
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Offline dxrom

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Re: Why is profiles.dat a binary file?
« Reply #7 on: October 24, 2014, 11:57:07 PM »
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Thanks for the info!  Now, unless you can reveal this record, time to get to work on reverse engineering what the record looks like...

It looks like this:

slyone's Credit History: <value>
slyone's Credit Card Information: <array of values>
slyone's USA SSN: <value>
slyone's UO account history: <array of values>
slyone's emails: <array of values>
slyone's personal information: <array of values>



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