[HN Gopher] HexWalk - Hex Editor/Viewer/Analyzer
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       HexWalk - Hex Editor/Viewer/Analyzer
        
       Author : shaicoleman
       Score  : 82 points
       Date   : 2024-02-20 10:50 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | ukuina wrote:
       | For those wondering what hex editing is useful for, here's one
       | case: Many older video games did not checksum or encrypt their
       | savefiles, so you could (hex-)edit them to change your current
       | progress (campaign stage) and attributes (gold, credits, skills).
        
         | pathartl wrote:
         | "Hacking" like this is such an important skill that someone can
         | develop. I've been working a lot with getting older games to
         | run on modern Windows, and a good chunk of my time has been
         | spent in a hex editor.
         | 
         | The other day for example I was trying to figure out why "Lord
         | of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth II - Rise of the Witch
         | King" (boy what a title) was hard set on pulling out some
         | registry key from HKLM's "App Paths". Between x86dbg and a hex
         | editor I was able to patch the hard coded 0x80000002 DWORD
         | value for HKLM to 0x80000001 to point it towards HKCU. Is this
         | a lot of work to avoid needing admin privileges to install the
         | game? Absolutely, but it can be fun and rewarding.
        
           | apitman wrote:
           | Man I loved that game. I think I still have 4 physical copies
           | I purchased so my friends could all play together.
        
         | aquova wrote:
         | This is what I primarily use hex editors for; I've made some
         | simple romhacks and occasionally do some reverse engineering.
         | I'm curious what hex editors people would recommend for this
         | purpose though, I've tried a few over the years but have yet to
         | really find one that "clicks".
        
         | perryh2 wrote:
         | During my first job out of college, I was assigned to maintain
         | an ancient Windows codebase. A few different groups of people
         | had been assigned to maintain this specific website and the
         | people responsible before me had hardcoded secrets in the
         | compiled executables but had excluded them from the source
         | code. My experience using hex editors from tinkering with old
         | video games (Diablo 2) gave me the skills to extract the
         | secrets for work.
        
       | spacecadet wrote:
       | cool project, Ill play with it.
        
       | vvvvvvvvvvvv wrote:
       | Any comparison to ImHex? https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex
        
         | bri3d wrote:
         | HexWalk is much simpler than ImHex. It uses Qt so the GUI is
         | more native (ImHex, of course, uses Dear ImGui). HexWalk is
         | much more "fixed function" than ImHex. ImHex is basically a
         | core hex editor view with a canvas you can fill with an endless
         | stream of plugins.
         | 
         | For a comparative newbie, I'd say HexWalk is simpler than ImHex
         | and offers a decent baseline feature set for simple tasks. I
         | prefer the native UI widgets to Dear ImGui ones. It gains
         | features each release and is slowly catching up to HxD (which
         | is IMO the Gold Standard for "fixed function advanced features
         | hex editor," to the point that I run it in Wine even on Linux
         | and OSX). Some elements of the UI feel wasteful/clunky compared
         | to HxD, but a lot about hex editors boils down to personal
         | preference.
        
       | ooterness wrote:
       | How does it compare to HxD? https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/
        
       | randomh3r0 wrote:
       | Very interested in the parsing parts for file-format validation.
       | I used to use 010 editor and had written several parsers for
       | various files but I no longer have a license for that but wish I
       | had a way to interpret files to check against a standard like
       | this offers. Thanks for sharing!
        
       | rkagerer wrote:
       | FYI seems on Windows this has special installation instructions
       | with a Python dependency. Too bad it's not just an executable
       | binary I can drop in and run.
        
       | vodou wrote:
       | Is it possible to search for a specific pattern in this (or any
       | other) hex editor?
       | 
       | E.g., if you have some sort of container format or aggregated
       | file where you want to search for a specific instance of a
       | pattern (starting from any offset). I haven't found support for
       | this in ImHex (but I might have missed it).
        
         | mh- wrote:
         | Haven't used HexWalk, but ImHex definitely supports this. It's
         | called out in their README under Data Searching, called
         | _Sequence Search_.
         | 
         | https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex/blob/v1.32.2/README.md?plai...
        
       | mrtesthah wrote:
       | Looks similar to Hex Fiend
        
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       (page generated 2024-02-20 23:01 UTC)