Alright guys and girls my trial period of Hex Workshop is just about over so now I have to decide if I should part with $49 to buy it or no. Thankfully I stay in the UK and the pound is still strong against the dollar so it'll only work out about £25 which isn't too bad for a bit of software I'm probably going to use quite often.

Before I take the plunge does anyone have any recommendations on others I should check out first? I like Hex Workshop because of it's crystal clear comparison ability between files, I think it's so good I'd be willing to pay for it.

I've tried FRHED and that's pretty nice but the comparison option is pretty weak.

EDIT - Should have said I'm only going to be using it for Rom and SaveState hacking.

Pay?  Why not be naughty and just find a crack?


That's would I did! 

xvi32 is pretty good. It doesn't have features like tables, but it's more than adequate for simple editing and ROM hacking. (It's what I've used for all my NSMB hacking!)

But why do you want to use a hex editor for text cutting and pasting? You should probably be using a better tool for the job. Besides Windhex can do this I think. I don't know. I don't think I've ever had the need to do this. Why do you have to do this anyway?

i did say it was a fairly specific need. i pretty much search the ROM for text i see in-game, which lets me find which script file has the text in question

i could just use a batch search utility or somesuch, i guess... maybe even windows search can do it.

windhex doesn't do it, no. you can't paste full-width japanese into the find box and have it work, even if using the shift-jis table. i actually don't see any way to search for japanese unless it's simple half-width kana. so basically, for any game, you can't search for any japanese dialogue at all, unless it's a game with very few or no kanji.

the best way to do it (for standard japanese formats, anyway) is the way cygnus does it -- it has a find box that is like the hex editor main window, with both a text section and a hex section. when you paste shift-jis in, the appropriate hex values will appear, and you can search for them.

EDIT: ideally, one would paste japanese into a box, it would use the loaded table to figure out what hex values correspond to this text, and would search the ROM with these hex values. it seems like this was not properly implemented, likely due to mishandling of the string pasted in. (treating it as signed char text instead of unsigned char/byte data, most likely.) for example, i can paste japanese text in, hit find, find a 0x00 or something like that that isn't correct, and then hit F3 to try to find again, and it will say that no text was entered to be searched for.

while we're talking about program suggestions, how about a MRU list for ROMs and table files?

Went for HxD in the end. Very easy to use interface and a good comparison tool which I think is going to be improved upon in future editions.

Cheers guys.