Datamining for my money has nothing to do with what some use the term for.
If I am in industry and want to hire a dataminer I am not necessarily going to expect them to understand file formats, assembly programming, game design and such like. I want them to take multiple databases, line them up/tweak the layout such that they can speak to another and make interesting queries to pop out and reveal unknown data (who or what is buying my product for instance beyond boring and basic stuff I might know). They might also direct some data collection to further those ends.
However it seems various gaming rags have taken to calling the act of diving into files to extract information about them, something known as ROM hacking for many years now, datamining for reasons I am never quite sure about (maybe they have an aversion to the word hacking, would not be the first time).
Now some of those that get articles detailing their exploits are not necessarily the same as those you might find translating games, making cheats, fixing bugs, modding controls, making new levels and whatnot but they all speak the same language and have the same skills, use the same tools and have the same general paths into it all so... yeah. Some "dataminers" will also use more statistical methods; if I am making a tetris clone I can figure out the exact randomness generator (is it random, random from a bag, aids you, actively hates you or whatever) but you can also watch several hundred next piece picks and get basically the same result. I have seen it used in limited capacity for those that might determine the stats of every weapon by play; personally I would use cheats to help along there (easy enough usually to make cheats to get every weapon, enough money to buy them, savestates if limited resources to make them, infinite health to cruise through them...)
Anyway yeah you can do it for any game. The Gamecube, being an optical disc based system, has a filesystem which means you can explode the game into separate files (such things do not exist for the 16 bit consoles, 8 bit consoles, the commercial GBA world or the like as anything that old on a cartridge almost certainly did not have anything like that and was one massive blob).
People take general knowledge of file formats (see general programming), specific formats ( http://wiki.xentax.com/index.php/Game_File_Format_Central http://www.amnoid.de/gc/ http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=Category:Game_Formats ), hardware information ( http://hitmen.c02.at/files/yagcd/yagcd/frames.html , has some on the various formats used, will also note the wii repeated a lot of things as it is basically an overclocked gamecube and the DS and 3ds also share more than a passing familiarity in a lot of cases) , general common sense (file names, extensions, sizes, directory names, magic stamps, strings search... and elimination based on all those -- a massive file called music is probably going to be music which is nothing if you are looking for level layouts), some more hacking techniques (relative search https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/513/ , corruption, tracing/debugging https://www.romhacking.net/documents/361/ ) and more to figure out files, what is there, what is not, what might be the subject of https://www.unseen64.net and https://tcrf.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor one day, what might have changed between versions (regions, updates, ports... all good for comparisons), what developers left behind ( https://www.pagetable.com/?p=28 ) and more besides. https://gbatemp.net/threads/gbatemp-rom-hacking-documentation-project-new-2016-edition-out.73394/ http://www.feshrine.net/ultimatetutorial/ http://gbatemp.net/topic/291274-the-ultimate-nintendo-ds-rom-hacking-guide/ http://www.romhacking.net/start/ https://awesomeopensource.com/projects/reverse-engineering https://pinouts.ru https://wrongbaud.github.io/posts/ghidra-debugger/
If I am in industry and want to hire a dataminer I am not necessarily going to expect them to understand file formats, assembly programming, game design and such like. I want them to take multiple databases, line them up/tweak the layout such that they can speak to another and make interesting queries to pop out and reveal unknown data (who or what is buying my product for instance beyond boring and basic stuff I might know). They might also direct some data collection to further those ends.
However it seems various gaming rags have taken to calling the act of diving into files to extract information about them, something known as ROM hacking for many years now, datamining for reasons I am never quite sure about (maybe they have an aversion to the word hacking, would not be the first time).
Now some of those that get articles detailing their exploits are not necessarily the same as those you might find translating games, making cheats, fixing bugs, modding controls, making new levels and whatnot but they all speak the same language and have the same skills, use the same tools and have the same general paths into it all so... yeah. Some "dataminers" will also use more statistical methods; if I am making a tetris clone I can figure out the exact randomness generator (is it random, random from a bag, aids you, actively hates you or whatever) but you can also watch several hundred next piece picks and get basically the same result. I have seen it used in limited capacity for those that might determine the stats of every weapon by play; personally I would use cheats to help along there (easy enough usually to make cheats to get every weapon, enough money to buy them, savestates if limited resources to make them, infinite health to cruise through them...)
Anyway yeah you can do it for any game. The Gamecube, being an optical disc based system, has a filesystem which means you can explode the game into separate files (such things do not exist for the 16 bit consoles, 8 bit consoles, the commercial GBA world or the like as anything that old on a cartridge almost certainly did not have anything like that and was one massive blob).
People take general knowledge of file formats (see general programming), specific formats ( http://wiki.xentax.com/index.php/Game_File_Format_Central http://www.amnoid.de/gc/ http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=Category:Game_Formats ), hardware information ( http://hitmen.c02.at/files/yagcd/yagcd/frames.html , has some on the various formats used, will also note the wii repeated a lot of things as it is basically an overclocked gamecube and the DS and 3ds also share more than a passing familiarity in a lot of cases) , general common sense (file names, extensions, sizes, directory names, magic stamps, strings search... and elimination based on all those -- a massive file called music is probably going to be music which is nothing if you are looking for level layouts), some more hacking techniques (relative search https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/513/ , corruption, tracing/debugging https://www.romhacking.net/documents/361/ ) and more to figure out files, what is there, what is not, what might be the subject of https://www.unseen64.net and https://tcrf.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor one day, what might have changed between versions (regions, updates, ports... all good for comparisons), what developers left behind ( https://www.pagetable.com/?p=28 ) and more besides. https://gbatemp.net/threads/gbatemp-rom-hacking-documentation-project-new-2016-edition-out.73394/ http://www.feshrine.net/ultimatetutorial/ http://gbatemp.net/topic/291274-the-ultimate-nintendo-ds-rom-hacking-guide/ http://www.romhacking.net/start/ https://awesomeopensource.com/projects/reverse-engineering https://pinouts.ru https://wrongbaud.github.io/posts/ghidra-debugger/
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