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Comment by ukuina | Hacker News Reader

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).

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"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.

Man I loved that game. I think I still have 4 physical copies I purchased so my friends could all play together.

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".

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.

Kids fire up IDA Pro to do that now. Wild

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