Beginner's Guide to Hex Editing

Before reading:

This section is for users that have never hex edited their game before, if you already know how to do this, nothing here will be of any use to you.

Before Beginning

There's several ways to apply hex edits to games, for the sake of this guide we'll demonstrate the manual way of doing edits to games in the event that the sites/services that simplify the process ever go down.

We'll be using HxD to edit beatmania IIDX 25 CANNON BALLERS, the process is the same for any other game so this guide can work universally.

Here's what you'll need:

  • Your favorite hex editor, such as HxD.
  • A clean copy of your desired BEMANI game.
  • A backup of your original .dll before editing in the event of any mistakes.

Getting Started

So after downloading HxD or your preferred editor and deciding on what hex edits you want to apply, it's time to load it up for the first time. If you're using HxD, you'll be greeted with the screen below.

Open up the appropriate .dll file inside HxD that you wish to edit, for the grand majority of hex edits, this is the main game file, such as bm2dx.dll, soundvoltex.dll, and so on. Pictured below, I've opened up bm2dx.dll inside of HxD.

Please note:

For demonstrative purposes, we're going to apply 1 edit to the game. The edit we'll be applying is EXCLUSIVE to this version of the game, meaning that it will not work on any other version of the game, nor any other games, because it's modifying specific addresses in memory that only apply to this specific version of the game.

The edit we've chosen to apply is Unlock All Songs and its edit is 0xB60B2: 74 10 -> 90 90 so to start in HxD we're going to hit Ctrl+G to open the Goto window. From here, we'll input the offset B60B2 inside the Offset section, as pictured, and hit OK.

Your cursor should be taken to the offset at the exact location you're ready to edit. As you can see, the numbers in front of you are 74 and 10 the same exact ones we need to replace! If they're not, it's likely you put in the wrong offset so be sure to double check.

From here, all we need to do is mouse over 74 10 and replace it with 90 90 you can do this by either manually typing 90 90 or by copy and pasting, it should look as it does below.

Once that's done, all you need to do is save the changes and repeat for every additional edit you want to do! The whole process is merely repeating by going to whichever offsets an edit requires and replacing the values in each location just as we did! Simple, right?