Every now and then Im asked how I make certain patches, well if you know the tools the rest is actually quite logical, so here I present a short explanation of the various tools used, most are freeware, some are shareware and a couple are retails. All of them can easily be found on the net, I only describe them here though.

Hackers View 6.51
My favourite hexaeditor, it even got a built in disassembler. This is obviously created for the sole purpose of cracking, and isnt very userfriendly for those who dont know the terms of cracking, but a nice tool to learn nevertheless

HexWorkshop 3.01
Even though Hackers view is a more powerfull editor, the dos nature of it kinda kills the convinience, therefore a windowsbased one is also quite necessary. This is a rather old version of this app though, but it is more than sufficent for my needs.

SoftICE
The most powerfull debugger available. I only use it for API hooking, but it got more extensive use than that. This is also mostly used for cracking, but it is so powerfull that it can be used for almost anything

FrogsICE
This isnt really an app, its just a anti softice detector. Many games try to protect istelf by detecting Softice in memory or tricking the int hooks making the computer hang. FrogsICE intercept most of these foul schemes..

WinDasm32 8.9
The best disassembler for the newbie. You cant do much cracking with this one these days (The gamecompanies has learnt about this extremly easy cracking) but can be used to train on shareware for educational purposes. It also gives you a pretty good insight on how things work

Regmon
A sweet little app by Sysinternals that monitors ALL use of the registry. Many crackers use this to track "hidden" entries used for protection purposes, but there are many legal uses for this as well, some games store save info in the registry others keep track of even more interresting flags here, its presented as freeware and should not be missed!

Filemon
Another one of Sysinternals small strokes of genious, keeps track of all hd activity. This is also one of the 'crackers essentials' but got an even more widespread use than the regmon mentioned above. I used this to make the censorship patches. When the game called for a script or censored pic it showed up here, unsuccessfully ofcourse, but I learnt the filename and exact location in resource file so the rest was easy.

Well folks, that all I use, there are ofcours a lot off additional tools out there like IDA, but I dont use them so much and I dont know very much about them. Besides, if you want information about these thats the second easiest thing to find on the net (Porn is the easiest ofcourse)