Hex Editing WinMX Third Party Programs and WinMX Tools To Work On The New Caches

With many of the users favourite programs being unable to connect, a solution is required to restore the proper operation of those programs, there are a few simple methods used and will require the use of a hex editor tool.

What Tools You Will Need

A hex editor tool will allow you to make changes to individual peices of the program, there are plenty of free ones on Google and you will notice most are the same.
You can obtain one from here Free Hex Tool or google for others.
I prefer to use hex workshop Hex Work Shop  as its one I have always used but they all offer the same basic search and replace functions so any type will do.


Deciding Where To Edit

To decide how we are going to edit the program we need to see what type of system is already in place and to see this we will need to open the program with the editor and use the search/find function to look for the older strings.




In one or two cases the programs have a fixed IP (older programs like NushiChat) in the format of 0.0.0.0.
The strings to search for are the following ones

64.246.15.43      216.127.74.62

These will need to be edited to point to a cache of your choosing from the ones found here:

Update: 2020




The current DNS locations are here.





In the majority of cases the address is a DNS one, (winmx.com), these will both require you to edit the existing code to point to the new cache adresses, the string to locate is the one below, although I often just search for the word winmx and get the location that way.

c331%u.z1303.winmx.com

In this case the place to start is the first C in the old c331%u.z1303.winmx.com and replace this with, cache%u.winmxcache.com (cache0 up to cache9 are all the currently available caches, %u is the variable for randomly selecting Cache numbers)
This should fit the address space perfectly with a space to spare.
To make a dot (.) of the right type you must use the hex code 2e or it will not work properly.

How do I replace the digits?

Ok so you found the strings and want to know what to fill/replace the digits with ?
The number side of things is simple, all the numbers start with 3 - So zero=30  one =31 and  9=39.
For example in the picture above 216. = three digits 32 31 36, followed by the dot(.) = 2E
Those would be replaced by one of the the new cache address's 31 34 35 - 145 as an example.
I,m sure you can see how simple those are to replace now.



The letters are a little harder as there is a different set of numbers for upper and lower case so the simplest and easiest thing to do is to look at some of the rest of the code on the right of the hex screen to find the letter you require and copy down the vlaues for each letter from the left side of the screen.
For those that are worried I have a chart here to help.




On this chart you merely select the digits you need from the green columns and type in the values in the orange column like so : "winmx" is made up of 77 69 6E 6D 78 and these are the values you would need to enter.

I hope this has shown you how easy it is to edit in the cases where the source codes are not available and the program maker has closed shop.
Some programs are unable to be hex edited and these are ones that are "packed" in a compressor to make them tamperproof and smaller in size, if you encounter one like this then its best to leave it alone.