I've been working on a tool for editting roms (sometimes you get a bad dump 😛 from your own cartidges, or maybe just want to change a few things like images, palettes, etc.) Anyway, it opens ANY binary formatted file, so you can even edit TI programs,
windows binaries, any rom from any console, .3ds models, pictures, etc.I learned how to do the vista style glossy look from cemetech's projects page and used to to create a "general" gui.basically, it looks like win7 regardless of whether you're using 98/nt/2000/me/xp/vista/7 .etc.

For some reason these won't show up in the forum, but if you click on them, the image will pop up.

just showing off my art so far, the loader...
http://www.sourcecore.webs.com/loader.bmp

the gui (unfinished, this screenie was taken right after fixing the 15bit color picker)
http://www.sourcecore.webs.com/snapshot.bmp

This sounds interesting; how do you plan to support "any" format? Some form of extensible format descriptor for each supported system?

no, just reads the binary and lets you edit whatever you want replace.Generally, its not prejudice.It could care less if you wrote hello in a txt file and openned it.Just DOES like droid

Ah, so something like a hex editor (but presumably with a few nifty features built in, hence the colour picker?) Sounds good!

yup! pretty much a reeeallyy nice hex edittor. I hate having to download 50 billion files just to get 1 job done, so i made my own.I started with python, but decided i'd be quicker and easier to use GameMaker8. no installer, everything just goes in 1 program.

I could have this finished tomorrow if i work steadily.I've completed all the scripts i need.Now its just making the GUI

Features Include:

Code:

I generally use XVI32 for my hex editing; it has a hex pane on the left and a character literal on the right. What featureset will you be offering vs. XVI32?

The main area should display the hex, ascii, and decimal values, as well as a small square displaying a 15bit color preview of the selected address to aid in palette editting if thats what your asking

Ah, that makes sense. What about finding/replacing numerical or text chunks (ie, searching by numerical or string values, and optionally performing replacement)?

Why 15-bit specifically? Is this an especially common colour format? (I've only ever come across it once, presuming you mean R5G5B5).

Actually it is ^_^ at least for the GBA anyway.The GBA uses 15bit for its OAM and BG palettes and is also used by the video buffers. I'd like to do backward compat for the GB,GBC,and NES roms, but I think I'll stick to what i know for now.

Like I said Kerm, it'll search and replace by unsigned and signed int, bin, hex, string, and color (aids in palette editting).It also searches for memory blocks, which helps find free mem.

I want to export and preview pics.My current method is reading the binary image data, converting from 15bit to 24bit, and drawing the pixels in order.It wayy too slow, is there a better way to extract the data, say to a .bmp or .png file?

It shouldn't be that slow; what language/platform are you using?

I'm not using a "language" per se, its GameMaker8.I'm friggin AWESOME at GML.Thats why I've flew through the project so fast.

I planned to use Python first, but when you compile for windows with py2exe you get about 50 billion files and i dont want that

Ah, I'm completely unfamiliar with Gamemaker Markup Language (right?). If I were to approach the problem in Python, I'd probably do a pixel-by-pixel colorspace conversion just as you are, though, so I'm afraid I know of no awesome optimization tips for that.