Cracking the
Billion-Dollar Black Box.

The "Black Box" Execution

We controlled the Windows Host and knew exactly what data was sent. The missing link was "How".

The commercial Real-Time Engine (Red Hawk) acted as a black box. We didn't know how it translated our high-level configurations into microsecond-level driver commands to control the FPGA cards cyclically.

Reverse-Engineering Behavior

Since I couldn't see the engine's source code, I focused on its output behavior. The Red Hawk engine ultimately had to talk to our FPGA cards through the driver.

I modified the FPGA driver to act as a "Spy". Every time the black-box engine tried to write to a hardware register, my driver logged the Timestamp, Register Address, and Value.

// Kernel Driver Pseudo-code: The Behavior Tracker
int fpga_device_ioctl(struct inode *inode, ..., unsigned long arg) {

    // 1. Intercept the engine's command
    struct cmd_data cmd;
    copy_from_user(&cmd, (void __user *)arg, sizeof(cmd));

    // 2. THE SPY: Record exactly HOW the engine drives the card
    // "At time T, it wrote Value V to Register R"
    log_driver_activity(ktime_get_ns(), cmd.register_id, cmd.value);

    // 3. By analyzing thousands of these logs, 
    // I reconstructed the engine's internal state machine.
    return write_hardware(cmd);
}

When Noise Becomes Signal

The raw data was chaos. But by correlating the captured timestamps with actions taken on the Host UI, patterns emerged.

The critical breakthrough was identifying the Crankshaft Synchronization logic—the heartbeat of the engine simulation.

Surpassing the Master

We didn't just replicate the vendor's system; we optimized it. By rewriting the control loop with modern C++ efficiency and cutting legacy overhead, our proprietary engine is faster and more stable.