Case study

blackhack: runblack.exe UI widget decompilation

blackhack rebuilds the SetupControl UI widget classes of runblack.exe as hand-decompiled C, covering buttons, big and tab buttons, check boxes, lists, sliders, edit fields, colour pickers, pictures and graph widgets, along with parts of Lionhead's lhlib. A Detours launcher checks the executable's md5, injects a DLL and swaps original functions for the rebuilt ones through per-version tables of function and data addresses. It also patches the fullscreen setter so runblack.exe always runs windowed.

Targets: Binary · Game
Category: Independent reconstruction cases
Relationship: Independent reconstruction project
Sources reviewed: 2026-11-09

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Requirements & limits

Prerequisites: Requires runblack.exe version 1.41 with the no-CD patch (md5 174b1a64e74b2321f3c38ccc8a511e78); other versions need new function and global address tables.
Prerequisites: Builds with CMake 3.14 or later and the Detours library.
Limits: The SetupControl implementation is almost complete.
License: No licence file in the repository.

Cite

BibTeX

@misc{blackhack-case,
  title = {{blackhack: runblack.exe UI widget decompilation}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://gitlab.com/bwrsandman/blackhack}},
  url = {https://gitlab.com/bwrsandman/blackhack},
  urldate = {2026-11-09},
  note = {Awesome REA entry: \url{https://awesomerea.org/resources/blackhack-case/}}
}

Plain text

blackhack: runblack.exe UI widget decompilation. https://gitlab.com/bwrsandman/blackhack (accessed 2026-11-09). Awesome REA entry: https://awesomerea.org/resources/blackhack-case/

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