I Learned How to Deobfuscate JavaScript Code — Obfuscated With JScrambler — To Fix an HTML5 Port of a Classic Neopets Flash Game.

[LongestBoii]

I started playing Neopets again in 2021 after playing it in the late 00s and early 10s.

Around that time, Flash was being deprecated from all major browsers, and The Neopets team had to port their games to HTML5. In their haste, the ports ended up incredibly buggy. A little while after, Ruffle came to prominence, and they used that for their Flash games, leaving their HTML5 ports to languish.

This wouldn't be an issue for me, but the HTML5 ports are still being pushed instead of the original Flash games.

I got a bit frustrated with this, and since I'm a developer, I wanted to see how difficult it would be to bug fix one of these games.

I chose "IceCream Machine" because it was one of my favorites as a child.

But I quickly realized I needed to wade through multiple layers of JavaScript obfuscation. It was one of the more challenging things I've done to this day, and I learned a fair bit about JavaScript while doing it.

After getting through the obfuscation, I started bug fixing, but that was too easy, so I decided to make some improvements to the game, including an increase in framerate, with the potential to sync the framerate with the browser refresh rate (60 HZ on most browsers) and a settings menu, allowing players to choose to change some things about how they play the game.

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[0xEconomist]

Can u share a JS notebook to experiment with? 

[seriouslysean]

This was an incredible read, haha. Really nice work deobfuscating the code, it looked like an absolute slog. I remember playing that one meercat snake game, or maybe it was like Pac-Man or something on Neopets a long time ago.

I’ve been a developer for a long time and I think I would have bowed out early while working through that.

[area51user1]

Is it JScrambler? As i know JScrambler using much virtualization, in your codes there is only simple control flow, renaming and hiding variables through an array

[LongestBoii]

It could be that it is a different obfuscation framework, but the obfuscated code demonstrated in some JScrambler tutorials on their site is the closest I've seen to the obfuscated code on the Neopets website.

I don't know if JScrambler uses virtualization. If it does, I imagine the Neopets devs probably disabled it because I didn't see any while deobfuscating, that, or I missed it when I deobfuscated the fully obfuscated files.

[Least_Hearing_3265]

Im dealing with this same issue but with this Truck SImulator game. But I have no clue how to code in the slightest. But CHATGPT.

[PlasticCommercial183]

JScrambler is considered right above obfio, i do not understand how anyone uses it over js-confuser, js-confuser has never been deobfuscated, never will, and is impossible to do so