Need help .dat

11/13/2017 02:58 loukarad#1
Hello i have i have one old game in .exe and it have a datafile.dat file and i cant read this file to see the values the file is encrypted can anyone help me ? thank you for your time !
11/13/2017 12:27 Serraniel#2
A dat file has not standard convention so it can be anything. I assume you have to reverse the associated software to find out how the data is written und read, including the encryption.
11/27/2017 17:35 UniversalScriptMenu#3
Try renaming the .dat to other extensions, .ini, .cfg etc. Sometimes changing the extension makes some lines readable that were not before. Has worked for me in the past.
11/27/2017 22:28 warfley#4
Quote:
Originally Posted by UniversalScriptMenu View Post
Try renaming the .dat to other extensions, .ini, .cfg etc. Sometimes changing the extension makes some lines readable that were not before. Has worked for me in the past.
Changing the extension does not change anything about the content, it changes just the default opening application to a texteditor. But you could also just open the file directly in a texteditor without renaiming it.

There is a fair chance that this is just a text file with .dat as extension. If so opening it with a texteditor is all you need. But the file could also be a binary file, than you will see a lot of wired icons, and maybe some cleartext in between. But you shouldn't edit those within the texteditor, then you need to figure the format out. You could try to take good guesses, but I think there is no way around some reverse engeneering.