Week 3 Studio: Cracking an archive format by hand

A guided hex-dump exercise on an undocumented archive format, worked alongside a tutor rather than solo

8 March 2027

Before the studio

Bring a hex editor you’re comfortable navigating. If you haven’t used one before, work through the short tutorial linked on this page before studio — the session assumes you can already move around a hex view.

In the studio

You’ll work through a .mdpak-style archive supplied for the exercise (structurally close to, but not identical to, the format from the week 4 case study) — finding its header, its file table, and pulling one embedded file out by hand.

Afterwards

This exact skill is what week 8’s studio work will ask of you the first time your own artifact’s files don’t open in anything.

The spec

What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.

you can identify a file's magic bytes and explain what they're for
you have located at least one length or offset field in a supplied file
you have extracted one file from inside a supplied archive by hand

Teaching team

Marisol Quaye — convenor