A four-year reverse-engineering quest saved decades of musical scores.

A developer named Maarten Tromp embarked on a four-year project to reverse-engineer Score Perfect, a music notation program discontinued in 2012, to save his father's decades of work. The software, first released in 1990 for Atari and later ported to Windows, stored files in a proprietary format. Its export function was incomplete, losing crucial elements like chords and lyrics.

The effort involved disassembling the program, analyzing its compiled native code, and meticulously mapping the file structure by comparing incremental changes. This painstaking process revealed a block-based format for storing measures, notes, and tags. The successful result is a translator that exports complete files to the modern MusicXML standard, ensuring the music's longevity. This is a classic case of digital archaeology saving creative work from software obsolescence.