Best/ Easiest to use hex editor/corrupter?

I want to try my hand at messing around with Super Robot Wars D and changing some stats around. I was reading around and it seems like stat changing involves corrupting the data in the game until you find the stat you want to change or something.

I've never done this before, so I wonder what most people like to use to edit roms with. Goldfinger sounds good...

I also find very little documentation on stat hacking (and the information I do get kinda worries me- changing a stat around seemed like such a simple thing in my mind, it's not like you'll be writing different if-then branches). Anyone else tried hacking stats around?

(For reference, I'd like to change the stats of either Super Robots, Super Robot pilots, or both... for obvious reasons to those who've played SRW D).

I use Translhextion primarily for hex editing, but a lot of people prefer windhex32. If you're going to be corrupting ROMs though, it isn't just looking in a hex editor and changing random bytes, you'll need to use a corrupter program. I've had good experience with ROM Corrupter.

The basic method is to corrupt a certain range of bytes (say 1000) at a time starting at the beginning of the ROM. The program I linked will automatically open the ROM in an emulator of your setting. My general technique is to create a savestate before the place in game I'm trying to corrupt. So if it's a menu I savestate in a place I can open the menu. If whatever you're trying to change breaks or changes, note the area. Once you find a range that breaks, narrow it down (try 500 bytes, then 250, etc) until you find the exact location that breaks or changes the game. Sometimes you'll have just overwritten a vital piece of code or other data and not what you are looking for, in this case just try the next range.

Corrupting is a bit of an art, so don't lose hope if you can't easily find what you're looking for. Experiment with different sizes of ranges and different values of bytes to use for corruption. For example, if you change everything to 00s and 00 is the signifier for the end of a string, it may break more things than using the table values from A-Z.

As far as stat hacking goes, I'd probably go about it by finding stat values in RAM with a cheat search then tracing backwards with a debugger. If something like that is above your grasp, your only other option is to master corruption.

I don't have business corrupting, so I won't comment on that.

However, finding what you want may be as simple as finding the right bytes or as hard as having to take a crack at asm. I know the PKMN GBC games for example use a 3rd degree polynomial to get the experience values needed to get to the next level.
I would find debugging much more useful. After all, you could hit a lot of stuff that just makes the game crash, change display code etc.

cYa,

Tauwasser

I tried just about every hex editor out there when I was first starting out. I used Thingy, Thingy32, Translhextion, Goldfinger, and many more. For a while, I actually used Goldfinger alot.

But that was until someone mentioned WinHex32, then I fell in love and it has been my main hex editor of choice since. I'm fairly sure no other hex editor has the capability to open up Japanese table files properly. Not to mention, it's got a great interface and many features.

~DS

So um... Why not use WindHex32, it's the widely used translation and hex tool as of 2006, sure it does have some little bugs, but this is not the kind of thing that is Deal-breaking or so a review said it was. Plus it's fairly easy to use, it's like any other Hex editor out there, but does have some of the nifty features every hex editor tool should have.

Alright, I got WinHex32 and Rom Corrupter. I probably won't get a chance to play with them until tomorrow. Thanks everyone. I hope I can ask more questions later on if I get them (hopefully not though, however unlikely).

Edit: I played with the Rom corrupter today on SRW D and using VBA's memory viewer, I accomplished... nothing. O_O I don't know where to begin finding the initial stat data.