Vincent Gable’s Blog

July 9, 2009

HeyPervertStopLookingAtMyPEF

Filed under: Reverse Engineering,Uncategorized | , , , , ,
― Vincent Gable on July 9, 2009

When I was in my early teens, I played a lot of Marathon — the classic Macintosh first-person shooter by Bungie.

There’s a detail about Marathon ∞ that I haven’t seen documented anywhere, but I thought was very cool.

If you tried to use MacsBug on a PowerPC machine to inspect (disassemble) M∞, none of the functions had names, except for one: HeyPervertStopLookingAtMyPEF.

(PEF stands for Preferred Executable Format, the way Mac OS applications stored PowerPC code).

Today, you can still play Marathon 2: Durandal on XBox Live for a price, or play any of the trilogy for free on a computer. Sadly though, I don’t think the game has aged as well as Escape Velocity, which is still a blast today.

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