General Binary Data Viewer for Windows Vista

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

What you probably want is a hex editor. The PSPad text editor has a pretty good hex-editing mode.

Answer 2

I use frhed and vim (with its convert to hex mode but that can be slow for big files).

Answer 3

Do you mean something that detects a set of known fileformats and knows how to display them? Otherwise, hex editor (for example PSPad contains one) is the best thing that you can wish for. It's just bits which can mean anything.

Answer 4

I use HHD's free HexEditor, it's Free!

Answer 5

I like xvi32, although it seems similar to the above - I've found it to be fairly fast even for big files.

Answer 6

I use Total Commander's built-in Lister (file viewer). It can show data as text, hex, it can show images. Then there are many plugins that range from code editors / viewers, image viewers etc.

Plugins I use are

• imagine for viewing images
• fileinfo for displaying info of executables
• HTML viewer
• Syn2 - code viewer / editor with syntax highlighting

There are a lot of plugins listed on author's web page, another good source is www.totalcmd.net

Answer 7

I've used Hex Workshop before, it has a "Find Strings" option in the Tools menu. Not free but works great.