Software i use regularly:

  • SFK Swiss File Knife . Very useful tool for binary files manipulation.
  • uCON64. Good alternative to SFK with ROM-specific features. e.g.
    • Game Genie code patcher: ucon64 --gg=XXX-XXX
    • Game Genie RAW code encoder/decoder: ucon64 --gge='AAAA:VV:CC' --nes
    • IPS patcher: ucon64 -i game.nes game.ips
    • IPS patch maker: ucon64 --mki=original.nes patched.nes
  • QuickBMS. generic files extractor and reimporter. Lot of compression algos and scripts ready to try.
  • jstrings. Find Japanese strings in binary data.
  • stringsext. Like jstrings, but support more encodings.
  • ezrominject. Simple text injector for Shift-JIS, to be used with jstrings.
  • romjuice. Simple text extractor using thingy tables.
  • Cartographer + Atlas / abcde. Table-based text extractor/injector.
  • signsrch. tool for searching signatures inside files.
  • binwalk. Popular alternative to signsrch.
  • qalc. Cmdline calculator.
    • convert decimal<->hex<->binary number: qalc "255 to hex" ; qalc "0xFF to dec" ; qalc "0x4 to bin"
    • hex calculator: qalc "(0x6594 + 0xFF) to hex"
  • cutlet. Accurate Jap->Romaji text converter.
  • uconv. Generic text encoding converter. Can also transliterate:
    • uconv -x 'Any-Latin;Latin-ASCII' # anything to ascii
    • uconv -f UTF8 -t UTF8 -x "NFKD; Lower; Latin-Hiragana;" # romaji->hiragana
  • CrystalTile2. Popular tool for gfx browsing and editing. Unfortunately discontinued and closed source.
  • Tile Molester. Good alternative to CrystalTile2, still mantained.
  • meikiocr. Local OCR
  • Monkey-Moore. Very easy to use tbl/table maker
  • ImHex. Hex editor with patterns and tables support (menu Import->Custom Encoding File)
  • wxMedit. Another hex editor with support for Japanese encodings, but not tbl files
  • cd_replace. Quickly replace files inside ISOs without rebuilding. Windows binaries here.
  • CDMage. Extract and modify almost all types of images. Unfortunately discontinued and closed source.

Emulators with good debuggers:

Disassemblers: