Reversing an ASIC-Assisted Arcade Game

Background

This one has been in the works for over a decade.

Had I known the amount of work that this game would require, I'm not sure that I would have ever started working on it.

However, the skills both used and learned while putting this together have been one of the most valuable reversing projects I have ever worked on.

To best illustrate everything that happened, I should probably start from the beginning...

First Attempt: ~2012

While working on other projects, I stumbled across a hard disk image for "Percussion Master" - an arcade game from IGS circa 2004 that was one of those knockoffs of drum-based music games such as Taiko or Drummania.

I decided to dig into the image and see what it was about.

HDD Image

The HDD image itself had a few partitions:

• The OS partition was pretty full-featured and uses a Linux 2.4.21 Kernel with a fairly stock Red Hat distro (around 7.3).
• It contained a rather basic swap partition with nothing of interest.
• It also had a game partition with data and an executable (peng) alongside some logs, webcam captures of players, and settings.
  • It's interesting that this game put writable data mixed in with its read-only assets, as corruption might screw up the game itself.