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.

Yeah even Resource Hacker allows drag and drop editing and ofcourse any resource editor will allow the addition of manifest.

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 this

function 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 jump


thus the output source code take you more much time in reworking it back. only hardcode programmers will have time and patience to do that.


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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.
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This post has been edited by vhortex: Apr 10 2006, 11:57 AM

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 Astahost.


Cheers,


MC

so actually you could change the exe file and there wouldn't be any registration anymore ...

sweet

not that i'm planning to do this, but are those FIXED exe files ?

I'm not going to comment on disassembly and resource editing because several other people have done that. However, if all you want to do is change the details of the exe on program load, then you will need a hex editor to change the header of the exe file. Headers of most varieties of exe files are well defined on the internet, just do a search. Some common things that this needs to be done for is increasing stack space for programs that use recursive functions if you want to run a large number of iterations.

~Viz

Use of editing EXE file
Where Can I Find An .exe Editor

It is just beginning for me to open the exe file code. According to me the opening of exe file is usefull.

We can open code of visual basics projects. Then the changes become very simple and there are very useful projects that we can change without doing excessive labor again. We can change th functionality of the program also.

-Satwinder Singh

extent
Where Can I Find An .exe Editor

Since there is no straight forward method of editing an exe then what are the limitations that I am bound by?

I have only done some minor exe editing a few years back but lost interest for a while. Since I have found this thread I was wondering what are the extremes that I can do to an exe without corrupting it?

Changing parameters in an .exe file
Where Can I Find An .exe Editor

I would like to run an old (1997) dictionary program that was designed to read its data base on a its CD - the CD reader being on the "D" disk - if the CD reader is not on the "D" disk, it doesn't work. To make its execution faster, and liberate the CD reader, I would like to load its data base on an external hard disk, and modify accordingly its .Exe file.



Hope there exist a simple way.



-question by Bagheera

Obviously, this is a protection against copy.
If you simply copy all the files to your hard disk and run the .exe file and it does not work, that means that your software absolutely wants to fverify that it's running from a CD.
I would like to warn you that modifying the exe file without his author's agreement is forbidden in most of the countries, so, forget about it, or at least don't try to ask here : reverse engeneering for hacking purposes is against our forum rules.