Question

I’m looking for recommendations for a good program for 32-bit Windows Vista that will load any arbitrary binary file and display textual information or graphical visualization relevant to identifying what actual data the bits are supposed to represent. Is ther anything better than a hex editor for this kind of thing?

One thing I’d like to do is say, look at the non-visible data in a Spore PNG file to get a clue as to what’s actually being stored in there. Right now I’m using WordPad and all I get is something that looks like this:

‰PNG

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/Qã!$D4"Ž‚îvÚ°‰ÅØàïjÃÞÉ_{!…‡ú 9¥Ý´îÁ6 ‰ms ^

I guess what I’m looking for is a souped up hex editor that acts more like an Excel for bits so I can slice and dice statistical patterns to get a better idea of what the bits might be doing.

Answer 1

Try HxD:

HxD is a carefully designed and fast hex editor which, additionally to raw disk editing and modifying of main memory (RAM), handles files of any size.

The easy to use interface offers features such as searching and replacing, exporting, checksums/digests, insertion of byte patterns, a file shredder, concatenation or splitting of files, statistics and much more.