In addition to simply changing the value, we can use the checkmart at the very left to "freeze" it, whereĬheat Engine will try to keep the value from changing automatically (it's not perfect, but it's goodĮnough for most cases). So since we changed the value and the actual health changed in-game, we know this is the right address. Either way, we can edit the file and then save it. Look up the character encoding in the ASCII table and edit the hex side. We can either edit the direct directly on the right by clicking and typing to overwrite the symbols, or we can Well since for the original example we're dealing with normal ASCII (within the word document), we can edit it rightĪway. Languages, it's important to get an editor that supports the kind of encodings you'll be working with. If you're going to be viewing things with a lot of special characters or especially foreign Something in the wrong encoding can result in something totally unreadable, so it's important to try viewing data withĪ few different encodings. Rest of the text is displaying something we can at least make out, but this is not always the case, and viewing You'll notice that while most charactersĪre "00" and then something, the TM symbol is different in that it actually does use two bytes for it's value. The end is not displaying properly, because that character is not in ASCII. Instead of one, but the editor is still trying to display it as if it was ASCII, which is why the (TM) symbol at That's because UCS-2 uses TWO bytes per letter Notice that, even though the text is readable, it seems broken up. We can find some of the text that the file actually contains. If we scroll down a bit in the example file, Well we can view the file, what about editing it?įirst we need to learn about character encoding. So if you have a missing extension or you think the cake extension is a lie, check out the first few bytes in a hex editor and do a little googling. It points out that's the ID for a Microsoft Word (pre-07) document. For our example file, it's "D0 CF 11 E0 A1 B1 1A E1", and from a google result, This is often a certain sequence that is used to identify a fileįormat. In general, the first 2-16 bytes/pieces (4 is most common) are known as the What we're interested in right now are the first few Of it in plain text, but we'll get into that later. On the left is the raw hexadecimal information contained in the file, and on the right is a representation So the first think we'll do is fire up HxD and open the file in it.
HxD for ease of use so that's what the screenshots will show.
#MODIFY EXE FILE DETAILS FREE#
There's lots out there both paid and free (Hex Workshop, XVI32, Catch22), but I prefer the free Recorded data, so it's an invaluable tool to have around if you're going to be doing this type of thing. A Hex editor can open any file out there and make raw, direct changes to the If you don't know what a file contains or you need internal information without an official editor, youĬan always use a Hex editor. So how else can we figure out what type of file it is?
#MODIFY EXE FILE DETAILS WINDOWS#
It's used for Windows to know what program to open the file with, so don't assume it's always correctīecause it's not. The extension is easy to change, youĬan simply go into the Windows folder options and uncheck the setting to hide extensions for known types.īecause of this the file extension is not concrete, and it does not determine the format of a file. That's because Windows goes by theįile's extension (the letters after the final period in the name). We can see in this version that Windows doesn't know what the file is.