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Best Free Hex Editor?
Captain_Brian
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm trying to create a unit/stats editor for a couple of games that have their values hardcoded in the game's exe.
Anybody have a recommendation for a free hex editor? Preferably one with a calculator and the ability to search/bookmark multiple values to help track things down?
Best case I'm looking for something that I can feed in a bunch of stats for a particular unit and then the hex editor will tell show me places where those values are all close together. This is my first time attempting a program of this type so any other tips would be welcome as well.
Anybody have a recommendation for a free hex editor? Preferably one with a calculator and the ability to search/bookmark multiple values to help track things down?
Best case I'm looking for something that I can feed in a bunch of stats for a particular unit and then the hex editor will tell show me places where those values are all close together. This is my first time attempting a program of this type so any other tips would be welcome as well.
Captain_Brian on
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try notepad++
Joe's Stream.
I usually use XVI. BPSoft's Hex Workshop is simply the best hex editor I've ever used, and there's a month or so trial period before you have to register it
edit: Not sure if any have the ability to look for sets of values that are "close together" though. The values could be encoded into the file in multiple ways (float/int), the file could be compressed or checksummed
I'm not really seeing how that would be helpfull...
I've already got Notepad++ and it does not handle hex editing natively. There is a hex editor plugin which is about as barebones as a hex editor could be, and it doesn't allow you to search in binary or even have a hex calculator. Not to mention none of this would allow multiple searches with a comparison on how close the values are together.
There must be a program/tool that game editor creators use the help speed up the process. I could always modify an open source hex editor to add in the functionality but I'd rather not re-invent the wheel.
Bah, that's what I thought. I used Hex Workshop years ago and it was great, I had just figured there had to be something better by now....
I've never had a problem with floats or ints and I've never seen a game exe compressed or checksummed. Usually all the values are close to eachother and its just a matter of taking the time to go through every block of values and changing them to see what sticks and what crashes the game.
I'll give the newest version of Hex Workshop a look, but it's sounding like I'll have to make a tool to help with this...
Well, if you can't do it with notepad++ on Windows, I would suggest breaking out a linux distro and using one of the multitude of free, nice, good hex editors there.
Joe's Stream.
I'm still not seeing how this is helpful... :?
Notepad++ wasn't designed to be a Hex Editor, and the plugin available for it is barely passable as a functioning hex editor. And suggesting to switch to linux and randomly trying hundreds of different hex editors isn't particularly helpful either.
I'm looking for information from people who have actually used hex editors for this purpose or have experience in creating game exe editors. I'm trying to find out which editors have features that will help me do this so I don't have to install and try out dozens and dozens of hex editors only to find out people just normally do it the hard way one byte at a time.
Here's one using basic unix commands, including the old standard vi.
vi $foo
<now editing in vi>
[esc] :%!xxd
<now editing $foo in hex>
<find some innocuous string or rcsid>
<change the values on the hex side>
[esc] :%!xxd -r
[esc] :wq!
$foo <somefile>
and if using vi is somehow beneath you, here's a list of hex editors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_hex_editors
Joe's Stream.
the thing is, that aside from knowing that he wants to be able to edit certain parts of binary files, I have no idea what to tell him to use/look for as the problem that he's trying to solve is unclear to me. I mean, I reverse engineered various bits of the RDP protocol using "od -x | vim -" and staring at licensing hexdumps for hours on end trying to find the magic bit. I've also dissasembled code, and made it skip certain portions... like DRM provisions.
Is he trying to make a trainer? Change player stats in a game? Disassemble and change the code? "I need a Hex Editor" is such a generalized question that its hard to give good advice. Its like saying "I need a programming language".
Joe's Stream.
???
Original post:
:?:
Ok, so you want to make a trainer.
I'd caution against modifying the game .exe directly, because if you screw up any of the offsets, pointers will be going off to lala land left and right.
You probably want to find where the values are stored for the objects that you wish to change in memory, or in a data file. The question is how do you find these values, and when can you change them so they take effect in the game? Let me dig around a little, there's a trainer framework out there for windows, and they have most of the popular games data formats figured out... i'll find it and send you to it.
There's a black art to what you want to do, and hopefully all you have to do is find the right values and change them, and not dissassemble and reassemble anything.
Update:
Start here: http://forum.cheatengine.org/index.php?sid=5d5bf70ded86fdde91ca91418dff1853
Sorry that this isn't as easy as pointing you at a hex editor, what you're trying to do is really obscure, but a wonderful way to learn about how things really work in a computer.
Joe's Stream.