libbinmod - A generic binary inspection and patching library/tools
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0) Short installation
1) About
2) Goals/Motivation
3) Structure
4) Tool-specific info
4.1) bgrep
4.2) bsed
4.3) bips
4.4) bxxd
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0) Short Installation Instructions
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If you downloaded this source from git:
autoreconf -fi && ./configure && make && make install
If you downloaded a release tarball:
./configure && make && make install
In other words, standard autoconf.
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1) About libbinmod
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libbinmod is a set of utilities for inspecting and altering binary
files. By 'binary files', I am referring not to executables, but any
form of data blob, executable, or otherwise. This is also pretty
shitty and has been sitting on my HD for a while, so...yeah.
These (mostly) functional tools are provided.
bgrep - Binary grep
bsed - Binary stream editor (incomplete)
bips - IPS patcher
bxxd - Hex dumper
bflag - LAA flag flipper
bwrit - Binary insertion
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2) Goals and Motivation
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libbinmod was created out of frustration with current binary editing
tools. Essentially, your choices now boil down to one of the following:
* A graphical hex editor
* xdelta3
* One of numerous bgrep implementations
This is inadequate. For many reasons, not limited to the following:
* dd is not a good stream editor, and sed has limited usability on
binaries, at least safely so.
* Un-hexdumping is complicated by the multiple tools available.
There's xxd, hexdump, etc. All with different formats.
* xdelta is not a plaintext or readable format. It is special purpose,
and while it fares well, for smaller jobs a tool that operates on
plaintext would be nice.
* All of the many bgrep tools are not feature complete.
They might not be able to print context, display, etc.
* There's a lack of IPS patchers on linux.
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4) Tool-specific Information
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----- 4.1) bgrep
Binary grep isn't a terribly new concept. It is however, not handled
by GNU grep, and it is also done rather terribly in the numerous
implementations. grep's greatest strength is in the flexibility of
output that makes usage of the output elsewhere possible.
None of the implementations of bgrep I have tried provide this.
Not that my implementation does either, but hey. I'm trying at least.
----- 4.2) bsed
Just a dump search and replace tool. Move along now. Maybe someday.
----- 4.3) bips
bips is an IPS/IPS32 patcher. IPS and IPS32 are patch formats
commonly used in ROM hacks and game modifications. They offer no
contextual information, however, so once a patch is applied it
cannot be reverted without generating a patch backwards.
IPS is much more common than IPS32. However, it has a hard limit on
file size of 2^24-1 bytes, or 16M. This makes it useless on larger
files, which is why BPS/beat was used for Mother 3's fan translation
for example.
IPS32 is a variant of IPS which rather than get fancy like BPS or
xdelta, just fixes what broke and uses 32-bit offsets. Some of the
touhoumon rom hacks were distributed in this format. 2^32-1 is 4GB,
which is not likely to be hit since IPS has been largely obsoleted
already.
Additionally, there is an extension to the above used by Lunar IPS -
a truncation/expansion value immediately after the end. I'm unsure
if this can occur in IPS32; regardless, I check for a four-byte
value anyways.
----- 4.4) bxxd
Another hexdump implementation.
----- 4.5) bflag
Flips the large address flag in windows executables.
----- 4.6) bwrit
Writes a value to a file. Useful as a substitute for quick hex edits.