free binary file data pattern operation tool for windows

This release fixes several reported bugs, including application crashes.

It was discovered that some virtual machine emulation software (like Oracle VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation) may cause BSOD or computer restart when Hex Editor Neo 5.01 runs on host OS.

Affected configurations: Intel multi-core CPU (Dual Core, Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Duo Quad and probably others), OS: Windows 7 64-bit. Installed virtual machine emulation software: (VMWare Workstation, Oracle VirtualBox, probably Microsoft Hyper-V, although, it looks like a hot-fix is available from Microsoft for this bug - see MS KB article #975530)).

Steps to reproduce:

1. · Run a guest OS in virtual machine emulation software and keep it running.
2. · Launch Hex Editor Neo version 5.01 (on the host OS).
3. · Close Hex Editor Neo.
4. · There is a chance that your computer reboots, hangs, or generates BSOD 0x101 (CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT).

Obviously it should not be possible for Hex Editor Neo (a user-mode program that does not have any kernel-mode components) to cause this behavior: it appears there is a bug in Windows 7 64-bit kernel that causes this.

We have found the workaround that fixes this problem. Version 5.01.01 uses different system scheduler that seems to be more compatible with virtual machine emulation software.

Checksum module has undergone complete rewrite, featuring new algorithms, greatly improved performance and parallel execution. That is, when several algorithms are selected at once, Hex Editor Neo utilizes multiple cores or processors (if they are available) to execute them in parallel.

More hash algorithms are offered (the actual list depends on algorithms available through Cryptography API). More different ways to sum all values in a document or selection are offered, including signed and unsigned sums.

User interface for a Checksum module has also been improved.

Registered users: A license update is required!

A new license may be downloaded from the My Account.

You can now open Internet resources specified by their URLs in the File » Open dialog. The editor will download the file and automatically open its local copy.

Note: you can only use the File » Open dialog to open Internet resources, other methods (command line parameters, drag&drop, Explorer window) may not work.

Registered users: A license update is required!

A new license may be downloaded from the My Account.

• > Incorrect scope resolution for complex array indices.
• > Empty structures incorrectly had zero alignment, breaking any structure that referenced them.
• > Hex Editor Neo could crash when expanding string or wstring values.
• > When a script file referenced by a structure definition file was modified, Hex Editor Neo did not refreshed it properly, although notified the user of the change.
• > Enumeration visualization could produce incorrect results, if you used signed values in an unsigned enum.
• > Structure Viewer tool window could incorrectly display vertical lines.

PE header sample has been greatly enhanced. Now it parses more PE file structures, including import and export directory, resource directory, base relocation table, debug directory and others. It also illustrates how to use Javascript to extend the power of Structure Viewer's declaration syntax.

$print directive now does not automatically convert its argument to string; instead it uses Structure Viewer’s data visualization engine. This allows it, for example, to respect the "Display Hex Values" setting when displaying integer values.

For pointed types, not only the pointer value, but the snapshot of pointed type contents is visualized on a line (as it is for arrays and structures). In addition, a computed address is also displayed.

Javascript code now may be specified inline with a new javascript keyword. Note that VBScript code must still be referenced with #pragma script directive.

Structure Viewer now supports the following statements: while, for and do…while.

Structure Viewer now uses the current editor window's encoding when displaying non-Unicode strings.

All Hex Editor Neo commands (such as Fill, Find, Find All, Replace etc) now respect the current window’s encoding, when single-byte string type is chosen. The current encoding is also displayed in the command’s dialog. Note: when using regular expressions, default system encoding is always used.

Current editor's window encoding is also respected by Pattern Coloring module.

Portable Installation

Setup now offers new installation mode which can be used to make a portable copy of Hex Editor Neo. Once installed, the copy of the product may be transferred to other locations, or to other computers where it can be used without installation. In this mode setup allows the user to install the product on the removable media and network shares.

Transactional Installation

Setup now performs installation of the product as a single transaction (on supported operating systems and configurations). If anything goes wrong during installation, including software or hardware errors, computer configuration is not modified. All setup activities are part of the transaction, including modifications done to the file system and system registry.

Restart Manager Support

Now, when setup needs to replace or remove a locked file, it uses the system restart manager to find the application that has a file open. It also offers a way to gracefully restart the application in order to update the file. This new feature greatly reduces the need for system restart during setup.

Per-User Installation

In addition to the previous, "per-machine" installation mode, a new installation mode is offered. It allows the user to install the application only for himself. In this mode, setup does not modify any per-machine settings. In addition, a user does not have to have administrative rights to install the Hex Editor Neo. After the product is installed in per-user mode, it is not visible to other users of the computer, but may also be installed by them in per-user mode.

Hex Editor Neo is now capable of working with files shared with other applications. After you open a shared file, Hex Editor Neo starts watching for file's modifications. If another application makes changes to a file, Hex Editor Neo displays a Shared File Conflict Dialog, which gives you options to ignore a change, update editor's copy, and/or merge changes with local changes.

In addition, for all "update"-kind options you may instruct the editor to compare the new version with a previous one. Two file comparison algorithms provided by File Compare module are supported. Hex Editor Neo also allows you to retain older versions of a file in the editor. You may edit these old versions as any other kind of document in the editor, save your changes and so on.

This release focuses on major performance improvement in one of the core Hex Editor Neo components, responsible for working with large files. (Hex Editor Neo considers files bigger than 64 MB on 32-bit systems and bigger than 128 MB on 64-bit systems as large files).

Careful optimizations and wiser use of system resources allowed us to greatly optimize this core component. As performance of most editor functions depends on it, we have managed to improve the speed of various functions from 2x to 8x!

The most boost is displayed in "cheap" operations, like General Statistics and Pattern Statistics, moderate boost in heavier functions as Replace All and less boost in "heavy" functions like Find All, for example.

In addition, document saving performance has also been greatly improved. On some of our test platforms, file copying (File » Open command followed by File » Save As… command) works faster than in Windows Explorer!

Until now, each new upgrade required our customers to re-install the license file to re-activate the product. Although this is still required for this update, the licensing system was updated to remove this limitation. All future upgrades will not invalidate the license installed for the 4.76.00.2905.

A critical bug has been found in 4.74.01.2838 release.

Upgrade is strongly recommended!

The following bugs are fixed in this release:

The following improvements were made to the Structure Viewer:

This update fixes an application crash (which occurs in Free Edition or with "Auto Create Branches" option switched off in some circumstances).

Upgrade is strongly recommended!

Version 4.72 brings support for x64 executables.

Version 4.71 brings support for .NET assemblies. It also features an updated disassembler view window, with support for fast navigation, selection of assembly text, column configuration and much more. It also allows you to display an assembly listing in AT&T format.

Disassembler has an improved quality of the assembly listing. Module imports are now also analyzed and displayed, in addition to symbols.

The most of the new functionality is within the Structure Viewer module again. It now understands new built-in types, statements and directives. It also supports variables, constant and variable arrays and expression evaluation with dynamic type inferring.

This release eliminates most of previously imposed limits on structure size, array size etc. The Structure Viewer Tool Window has been updated to easily handle billions of items with very fast and clean navigation. Commands like Expand All and Collapse All will take less than a second expanding/collapsing a structure with a billion of items. If you bind a complex structure to a huge file (for example, AVI), you can estimate the editor to easily carry the job without running out of memory.

A number of handy features, such as Synchronize Position (which works "both sides" - from structure to document and from document to structure), Mouse over field tracking (which highlights a field under the mouse cursor) greatly simplify the file structure analysis.

Structure definitions may extend their functionality by referring to functions written in JavaScript or VBScript. These functions have access to the underlying parser and document, thanks to the IFileDocument and IParser interfaces, exposed to them by the Hex Editor Neo.

The overall compilation and binding performance has been greatly improved. More information about the new functionality provided by the Structure Viewer is found in the included documentation.

The Advanced Copy & Export module now follows the model offered by the editor window. It now allows you to execute the Copy and Export commands with no selection present. In this case, a cell under the cursor is copied/exported.

The current byte order is now taken into account when performing copy or export functions.

It also offers an option to configure the number of digits to be exported for floating-point and double precision floating-point types.

A previously introduced ISequence object was called to make it possible to call methods of the IFileDocument interface from scripting languages (such as JavaScript and VBScript). Although, our tests has shown, that in some cases it is still impossible for a script to call one or another method due to the limitations in the Automation model and the way scripting engines are implemented.

This release finally resolves the problem by providing a special variant of each affected method. Every such variant may be easily called from the scripting languages.

You can now make any tool window appear as a tabbed document. That means that the tool window will not be dockable to one of the four sides of the main window anymore, nor it will float over the main window, but instead will be placed where all editor windows reside. You may then take advantage of the Editor Window Placement feature to position a tool window.

Each tool window now also memorizes its floating position separately of its parent frame.

Ctrl+Mouse Wheel now quickly changes the font size in an editor window. This is a quick way to change a font size without using the Layouts dialog.

Structure Viewer now supports a sophisticated structure definition language with expression evaluation, pointers and bit fields, case unions and assertions, constants and enumerations and much much more. A full featured C99-compliant preprocessor (with full support for macros and conditional compilation) is run before a source file is compiled.

In addition to the ability to bind a structure to an absolute or relative address or to a cursor position, a structure may now be bound to an expression. This expression may reference constants and enumerations declared on the global source file scope or even reference previously bound structures.

You can find more information in corresponding documentation section.

Large documents may get corrupted after modifications are saved in the Hex Editor Neo. This release fixes this bug.

Upgrade is strongly recommended!

Find in Files feature updates its behavior for the "Find all occurrences" mode. Now located documents are not automatically opened in the editor, thus saving system resources when doing large searches.

Located documents may be opened by double-clicking them in the list or using the Find in Files » Open File command. When you open a document this way, all pattern occurrences are selected in it.

A disassembler module has been carefully redesigned. It now allows you to have several views opened for the same document, each displaying different parts of it. It also works smoother and faster and fixes a number of bugs.

This release introduces a number of major performance optimizations that affect most Hex Editor functions. In general, the following performance boost is estimated:

• Fill, Delete, Cut and Paste - when they operate over a multiple selection - have up to 3x performance boost.
• Find All, File Compare, Selection Loading - up to 10% performance boost.
• Replace All - from 1.5x to 2x performance boost.

Similar numbers refer to Find in Files and Replace in Files functions.

This release has undergone several performance optimizations resulted in significant speed-ups in the following commands and features:

• * A special image cache speeds up application loading time. This special cache stores pre-rendered vector images (which are used throughout the Hex Editor) to significantly reduce the application startup time, which was very small even before this cache was implemented!
• * A numer of algorithm improvements allowed several editing functions to operate much faster and consume much less RAM. This include typing, inserting and deleting (with complex multiple selection).
• * Several improvements were made to the Find in Files feature, leading to much less memory consumption by this function.
• * File saving algorithms undergone several optimizations leading to smoother and faster saving.