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January 4th, 2011History of .black – RAGE research project
My .black project
History of .black – RAGE research project
Author: GooD-NTS
Nizhniy Novgorod, 2010
I started my .black project in May, 2008 when GTA IV’d been just released on xbox360. Right now I don’t remember why I’ve started it, maybe I just want to see how the Rockstar Games use the new engine.
It all started from a small program called OpenRPF, what I’ve made for opening RPF archives. It wasn’t functional enough because it could only open archives directly, not to decrypt anything (at that time I didn’t know about RAGE encryption). During the first days of May I was trying to find out, how the encryption is used in RAGE and how I could decrypt it. As this time I found one great man. His nickname was Listener. I am sure, you all know who it is. I began to ask him different questions about encryption but he refused to give me any information because it was confidential and offered me to find it by myself in assembler codes of GTA IV. He gave me the link to IDA and necessary plugins for it, and gave some pieces of advice.
Next week after that I was searching for it, I’ve never seen PPC ASM before, so it was hard. The whole week I was questioning Listener, and after a week I have done it. So I understood everything I wanted about RAGE encryption and got an ability to continue my work with archives. Also I have joined to Listener and small closed community (on sannybuilder.com) who’ve started the GTA IV research.