Is there a hex editor with multiple file compare?

[RyanfaeScotland]

Hey guys n gals,

Long time no see and all that.

I've been playing about with some save files recently for Constructor on the PC and have been encountering the same problem as I occasionally run into when rom hacking as well namely that 2 saves generated moments apart have way too much differences to make comparing them a trivial task.

I use HxD which has a decent enough compare function to be useful in most circumstances but every now and then, espiecally with RTS games or any game where there is a computer player, doing a comparison between 2 files yeilds so many results that iterating through them, changing their value and loading back in to see the results across all the differences takes forever. So what I was thinking is that an editor that could handle more than 2 files for comparison would make life much easier.

Here's the problem I am facing and how I see it working incase you are uncertain:

In Constructor you can build fences round a house by selecting the house, then the fence, then sticking a building team on it. Sadly the fence data isn't just a nice single value with the house data, it appears to be stored on a per tile basis which means it is all over the place. Doing a comparison between 2 files, one with the fence built and one with it not, produces a huge amount of differences and it takes ages to go through and test them all. So what I am thinking is if I could do a 3 way comparison or greater then I could make 2 saves with the fence unbuilt, a third with is built and then search for values that are equal in file A and B but different in file C.

Anyone know if such a program exists? Would anyone else find this sort of program useful?

[Pugsy]

I made a simple commandline utility several years ago that may be of limited use:-

http://www.mediafire.com/file/blg7ml6z5e7dovu/FIND.zip

It's useful for finding basic byte differences, I made it when the MAME/MESS cheat engine had no cheat finding capabilities so it's quite MAME cheat centric.

For file comparisons like you describe just run it with this commandline


FIND 0 FILENAME1 EQ FILENAME2 NE FILENAME3

It will handle lots of files....just keep adding more arguments to the commandline

[RyanfaeScotland]

Nice that's just the sort of thing I'm looking for! Now if you would just be kind enough to add a gui, the ability to search for relative differences, searches over fixed distance from a certain offset, ability to cope with different file sizes and anything else you think would be useful that would be great.

[xibalba]

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[RyanfaeScotland]

Thanks xibalba, although from what I can see HxD can only compare 2 files at a time. Can XVI32 or HeXecute do multiple file compare?

[xibalba]

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[TheDrakon]

Winhex has it it's "tools, file tools, compare"

[rimsky82]

It may be bloated for what you're looking for, but there's IDM's UltraCompare.

[Lazy Bastard]

It may be bloated for what you're looking for, but there's IDM's UltraCompare.

I tried this just to see if it was better than HxD's limited comparison feature, but it was even less useful. HxD still takes the cake, despite being woefully inadequate. WinMerge has a plug-in for hex comparison (you've got to run a very old version of WinMerge to use it though, and even then it requires some mucking around and 'pretending' to be doing directory comparison, etc), but it's only marginally better than HxD, and worse in most normal uses (takes forever to get through the GUI to hex file comparison).