I faked this screenshot but this is what I mean

I think I might be able to do the hack I want by changing one byte.

I'm trying to change it so it has "daily challenges", and I think I can fix that by just switching a INT 1A from subfunction 00 to 04, making it seed the random function with the date instead of the ticks-since-midnight

eh, I used 5 bytes. I don't need to impress anyone

NORMAL CODE

random(*(byte *)*(undefined2 *)
(*(int *)(*(int *)0x39a6 * 0xe + local_c * 2 + 0x1d02) * 2 +
*(int *)(local_c * 2 + 0x24b)) - 1);

I found another set of pronouns!

I haven't figured out how this game stores gender, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's like this:
male: 0
female: 4

why? because they have strings like:
char* HE="He\0\0She\0"
char* HIS="His\0Hers\0";
char* HIM="Him\0Her\0";

so they can do like:

printf("Follow %s to %s lair, and capture %s alive!", badguy->name, HIS+badguy->gender, HIM+badguy->gender);

I like how the game only asks your name, not your gender.
Player's don't have genders. Only thieves have genders.

It's a prequel to Disco Elysium, and your gender is set to COP

why does ghidra's "search by instruction pattern" default to BINARY?
what kind of a freak remembers the machine code for INT 21 on x86 in BINARY?
it's CD21h, not 1100110100100001!

what are you, some kind of nerd?

I love reversing a string and it's:

void printString(char* str, int length);

and I go look what calls it, reverse that function, and it's:

void printStringSimple(char *str){
printString(str, strlen(str));
}

it's like "aww, did someone have second thoughts about making PRINT always take a length, and got tired of having to manually calculate lengths so you just wrapped it?

and your compiler didn't inline SHIT?

oh those poor people of Bamako! Someone stole their.

okay so when you start a game (well, technically when you restart), the game rolls 3 dice:
0-31: where the shit was stolen from
0-2: which item it is from that location
0-8: whodunnit

like if you roll 0 on the first, you get Athens.
For the second one, it's:
0: mask of Priam
1: Achilles's heel
2: sibyl's secret.

The last die is used as a lookup table into the dossier's list.
It's got 1 added to it so you won't get Carmen Sandiego, as a rookie at least.

so the game uses a pattern like this:
char * RANKS="Rookie\0Sleuth\0Private Eye\0Investigator\0Ace Detective\0"

and then latter they do:

char* your_rank = select_string(RANKS, player->rank);

and select_string is a confusing function to reverse engineer, but knowing the name I gave it gives it away: it advances through the list until it's on the nth string and returns it

there is no check for going past the end.

so probably it uses the same trick for pronouns. The string I'm seeing is probably like: "He\0Him\0She\0Her\0"

Ghidra is officially sexist. It'll automatically detect the word "Female" and mark it as a string, but not the word "Male"!

Why? SEXISM!

or the fact the default minimum length for strings is 5 characters, so "female" is long enough but "male" isn't.