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Where Can I Find An .exe Editor

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There's no editor for .exe files that I know of. The only way you can edit a .exe is if you are a hardcore assembly language guy - coz that's what .exe's are decompiled to, when you open them up using a debugger. Some advanced debuggers can give you an output in a pseudo-algorhythmic language, but that's as far as they go. You cannot simply open up a .exe like a textfile and start editing.

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and you can try also with softice or something like win32diassembler and see what you will get.. :huh: if you don't know much about debbuging and reverse engeneering you would not get too much of it...

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*shudders* assembler still causes me to wake up screaming in the middle of the night :| stupid assembler...actually it's not that bad for low end stuff, but if you are planning on decompiling some huge scale program into assembler and editing it.... good freakin luck

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Wait, if you want to change something in an EXE file, you may be able to do this by changing its resource. There's a program called "Resource Hacker". It allow you to make some simple modification in the resources of EXE file. This way, you can change the interface of program in that exe file. You may also want to translate a program to your native language.

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Wait, if you want to change something in an EXE file, you may be able to do this by changing its resource. There's a program called "Resource Hacker". It allow you to make some simple modification in the resources of EXE file. This way, you can change the interface of program in that exe file. You may also want to translate a program to your native language.

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See with resource hacker you can only replace or extract Graphics ( gif/jpg or ico ) and String Tables in a .exe - you won't be able modify the actual code in any way. And if the .exe doesn't employ a separate string table, then you've to hunt down each and every string all throughout the .exe in order to port it to some other world language - it's a hefty task and quite often will corrupt the .exe, as not all character-sets contain chars in the same decimal range. Most of the East Asian languages constitute the DBCS (Double Byte Character Set) letters and numbers, and trying to replace standard ascii characters in a .exe with them will entirely screw up your .exe. Believe me - I've tried this extensively and almost always failed.

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Yeah, as it was said, there is really no way to "edit" .exe files very well. The reason is they are compiled (probablly in c++) and there is (real) way to decompile it back into C++ to edit. However, reverse engineering can get you pretty far, depending on what you do. The problem is is that it is extremely complicated and requires vast knowledge of ASM. However, if you plan to start doing this, google some reverse engineering tutorials. Also, I reccomend that you start with "OllyDbg", which is a very good and basic Debugger. It can be found at: http://www.ollydbg.de/

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When he said exe editors, I thought he meant hex editors. Apparently, I'm wrong (or just different?). If you want to edit a compiled exe file, you can use XVI32, a free hex editor. A compiled exe file looks very "encrypted", but you can use the editor to change tiny parts of an exe.

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Well I guess the replies above have made it quite clear that exe files are no ASCII files that we can edit simply. But yes "Resource Hacking" is quite interesting. The interesting part is the Dialog box editing. You can change titles and graphics of Dialog resources quite neatly! Usually you can delete the "30 Day expiration" dialogs and simply make the s/w skip over the limitation. I did it with Guitar FX Box 1.5. Worked great.Usually even the XP themes are made that way. You can Resource Hack the LogonUI.exe file to show ur own graphics...Enjoy! but be careful that none of this is legal...

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Usually the only thing in a .exe file is strings associated with the program and a built in image for the icon at various colour bits and sizes. If you want to get into a programs files you will need to use some sort of resource hacker mentioned by PureHeart, but it is definitely not easy, very complicated and time consuming. In my opinion unless it is absolutely necessary, don't both with it.

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you guys might want to try PE Explorer. It does disassmble an exe and let you edit every resource in the exe. You can change the dialog boxes, the color, the position and other stuffs. By the way editing the resources is not text based but a drag and drop style like the one in MS Visual C++ Resource editor. YOu can even add a windows xp manifest to an win32 application so it will have an XP look.

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There is no straight forward way to edit EXE but there are ways to do it.First for advance programmers, you can use a disassembler tool. This will translate the program from an EXE version back to a C++ /ASM or whatever but the output code will give you nightmares on reading and uderstanding it.Since the output source code will have funtion/procedure/variables names like thisfunction source001001 (.....)function source001002 (.....)var source 001003 as [datatype here]source 001004 as [datatype here]this will also prove much more hellish.. if the program uses jump codes..if (condition here) then goto source001000233 (some more code here)source001000233: <-- label for the jumpthus the output source code take you more much time in reworking it back. only hardcode programmers will have time and patience to do that. --------step two.. learn to translate binary machine byte codes to assembly codes and it be prepare to have a transmutation table. This is my prefered way.ex 90Hex is NOP code in the assembly. [no operation]Take note that you cannot add more codes this way nor more variables. You can only deactivate some parts of the program and take away some variables.trying to extend the EXE file will screw that program apart.--------

Edited by vhortex (see edit history)

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I would have answered this, but to be honest, that question did not make sense, nor did it show the level of expertise this person had.A disassembler, disassembles into assembly code, not C++ source code, that's a decompiler, which does it's best turning the program back into it's source equivalent. If the programs written in VB, use a VB decompiler, but these are not effective and can sometimes never get you source that can be recompiled.Hexeditors can edit the binary of an .exe file, but again, this is no walk in the park you would probably make no sense of it at all but you might be able to find strings within it that you could possibly alter.Ollydbg is quite a nice debugger which loads the program into memory and you can adjust registers for the program (good for creating money trainers, etc for games) or alter opcodes to perform different operations.Some programs use packers, which means you need to unpack them first to be able to work on the code.I think it's best to let this thread die, this person asked this question last year, and hasn't shown much commitment to staying with Xisto.Cheers,MC

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