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Reverse-engineering Codemasters' BIGF archive format in Ruby

The article details how to reverse-engineer Codemasters' BIGF archive format and read its binary data using Ruby. It walks through parsing the file header, file entry table, and extracting embedded files from the proprietary container format.

Background

- Codemasters was a British video game developer/publisher (now part of Electronic Arts), known for racing games like *Colin McRae Rally*, *Grid*, and *F1*. - "BIGF" is a proprietary archive format used by Codemasters to bundle game assets (textures, audio, etc.) into a single file — similar to a zip file but with a bespoke structure. - The author reverse-engineered this format (i.e., figured out the file structure without official documentation) to write a Ruby library that can read and extract files from BIGF archives. - This matters because it enables modding, preservation, and tooling for older Codemasters games that are otherwise opaque to developers and archivists.

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Reverse-engineering Codemasters' BIGF archive format in Ruby

Background

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