15.1 radare2 reverse engineering tools

If you have managed with the rest of this document then programming is not necessarily going to be hard for you to do. However as it has to be able to do lots then it can be more annoying to make a simple program if you have to set it all up. Equally it has been observed that despite frequently having some serious programming related skills, and probably knowledge of how data formats are constructed than most others out there, not all ROM hackers can easily knock out a program to do a given task (although more modern languages like python and C# are very capable and not so troublesome to learn). Various tools do various aspects of ROM hacking in a manner that is less fiddly than a programming language (although obviously less capable than a proper programming language), less likely to induce boredom than going by hand and more versatile than some of the field specific tools.

The suggested tool nowadays would probably be radare2 (sometimes called r2) which features a lot of nice things. The previous choice of program was one called ROMulan but its licence was felt a bit too restrictive to be the suggested program any more.

The documentation has basic usage but the main niceties are easy integration into scripts, extensibility via plugins and collection of hacking related functionality built into it.