Rich Whitehouse’s website is what happens when somebody keeps a technical notebook online long enough for its odd little experiments to become useful history.
The site has been accumulating posts since 2009 and is still active in 2026. Its subjects repeatedly circle around reverse engineering, game technology, obscure data formats and the sort of technical questions that begin with “I wonder how this old thing actually worked” and end several hours later inside a debugger.
A 2011 post on FX Fighter, for example, describes digging through a 32-bit DOS game’s formats with IDA Pro and the DOSBox debugger. A 2015 piece on the Sega Saturn version of Quake examines its level data and the unusual fact that the game was rebuilt around Lobotomy Software’s SlaveDriver engine rather than simply porting the original PC engine.
In 2017 Whitehouse wrote about old production data from the Genesis version of Disney’s Aladdin. In 2018 he produced DOOMBA, a Noesis script that could turn tracking data from a Roomba’s simultaneous localization and mapping system into randomized DOOM maps.
Yes: vacuum cleaner telemetry became level geometry. The old Web occasionally rewards persistence.
Noesis ties the whole archive together
Whitehouse is also the author of Noesis, a tool for previewing and converting an enormous range of game and media data formats. Its documentation covers plugins, archives, batch export, command-line operation and a data viewer, while continued version updates show that this is not merely abandoned freeware attached to an old homepage.
Noesis makes the site more than a blog about reverse engineering. Posts about formats and experiments connect directly to a working tool that lets other people inspect the same kinds of assets.
Later research includes an extensive Sega VR emulation project examining the unreleased headset. That combination—old hardware, undocumented formats, emulator work, source digging and public notes—is exactly the kind of material that becomes increasingly valuable as original development environments disappear.
The site reports tens of millions of page hits since February 2009. That number is the site’s own counter, but the more convincing measure of usefulness is simpler: technical posts written years ago still contain names, formats, engines and implementation details somebody can search for when a strange file lands on their disk.
CacheRat’s Ancient Web research corpus is full of specialist pages whose value comes from that accumulation. Whitehouse’s site is an unusually lively example because the archive never really stopped growing.
Some people maintain blogs. Some people feed Roomba navigation data into DOOM.