Hacking Do you recommend any good hex editors?

[Xdqwerty]

I wanna practice romhacking but the built in hex editors that emulators like bizhawk have dont seem to work.
well they kinda work but the text is broken

 

[mrdude]

HXD is the best free hex editor that I can find and I have used it loads. However for a paid one I have winhex which I use for looking in memory for running programs, also it's good for mounting sd cards/hard drives etc and editing/dumping things like boot sectors and such like. I also have x-ways forensics for some stuff. But for general use HXD is the way to go.

 

[SylverReZ]

HxD is a good free alternative. Its great for mounting SD cards, hard drives, amongst other devices; can edit boot sectors and files in general. I've always used Hex Workshop before, and it had some useful features like bit swapping and calculation tools.

 

[tech3475]

+1 HxD.

 

[Scarlet]

As above, HxD was always my go-to when perusing save files for values to change. Pretty simple to use and did everything I needed it to.

 

[master801]

Hexinator (free, but has paid features.)

One of the few hex editors that actually supports Shift-JIS.

Had to install HxD to remind myself why I don't like it, and that was the reason lol

Otherwise Hex Workshop is pretty nice, since it can highlight different parts of the binary. But it's pretty much abandonware since the last update for it was in 2014.

010 Editor (paid) is okay, but not my cup of tea.

And anyway, the hex editor in Bizhawk isn't meant to be an "all purpose general" hex editor. It's specifically for memory in the emulators, and some regions of memory aren't modifiable by design. Chances are you aren't using it correctly.

 

[linuxares]

Depends on OS.

Bless on Linux, HxD on Windows imho.

 

[Xdqwerty]

even text in hxd is corrupted

 

[Latiodile]

if you're expecting it to just give you a plain decompiled assembly readout, that's not how hex editors work

 

[Xdqwerty]

if you're expecting it to just give you a plain decompiled assembly readout, that's not how hex editors work

how do they work then?

 

[mrdude]

how do they work then?

LOL, are you serious? That code you are trying to read is compiled code that a computer understands. You can't read that with a hex editor and expect it to be readable, you need to unpack it, decompile it and even then it won't be source code that you can read. Just forget what you are doing as it's beyond your skill level, ask someone that knows about rom hacking to write you a tutorial and even then you won't understand as every game is different.

 

[composer]

even text in hxd is corrupted
View attachment 403787

So that righthand view in the hex editor is going to show you any ASCII Text in the file you're viewing. Any strings basically. The jumbled text you are seeing on the righthand side are assembly opcodes from the game code being interpreted as ascii text. To see what these opcodes disassemble to, you'd have to use another tool, like Ghidra, to view the disassembled/decompiled code.