
Reverse Engineering Instruments’ File Format - phleet
http://jamie-wong.com/post/reverse-engineering-instruments-file-format/
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vram22
Early in my career I had reverse engineered the DBF desktop database format
(XBASE), and used that info to write programs in both Pascal and C (at
different times) to read and print the metadata and data of DBF files. Later
did the same in Python as part of xtopdf, my Python toolkit for PDF creation
from other data formats. It was an interesting project for a relative
beginner. Good fun.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBase](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBase)

xtopdf overview:

[http://slides.com/vasudevram/xtopdf](http://slides.com/vasudevram/xtopdf)

DBFReader.py code:

[https://bitbucket.org/vasudevram/xtopdf/src/default/DBFReade...](https://bitbucket.org/vasudevram/xtopdf/src/default/DBFReader.py)

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saagarjha
It's interesting that you didn't look at the binary that created this file and
tried to reverse engineer it that way. If you're still looking for more, I'd
suggest going through
Instruments.app/Contents/Frameworks/InstrumentsAnalysisCore.framework/InstrumentsAnalysisCore.

~~~
voltagex_
For a lot of people (myself included), it's easier to look at the output and
try to pull it apart than it is to read x86_64 assembly.

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npendleton
binwalk is a good tool to use for this, especially early analysis:
[https://github.com/ReFirmLabs/binwalk](https://github.com/ReFirmLabs/binwalk)

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Animats
Putting "Instruments" in quotes would help. It's some program for Apple
computers here. This is not about figuring out what measuring instruments are
sending on the wire, something that's often proprietary.

~~~
myself248
HN headlines are often terrible like this. People take an existing word as the
name of their product, and if you're not deeply involved in whatever niche
this new gizmo occupies, you're left to click the article just to figure out
what the "Crystal 0.25" headline refers to.

