Shareware and Utilities

WinHexCom - Win32 Protocol Analyzer

WinHexCom is a dual channel Hexadecimal/ASCII/ANSI protocol analyzer for RS232, RS422 or RS485 full or half duplex synchronous and asynchronous protocols. This program works with any 'standard' PC serial adapter under Windows 9x or NT. It displays text in 4 colours, to enable one to easily see who transmitted or received what. Data logging is done in HTML, to preserve the colour information and make the log file conveniently browsable.

You can save up to 10 messages in the send message list box for quick transmission. Protocol Framing and Checksum calculations are made easy with built in CRC16, CRC32, Sum and XOR functions for any one of HDLC, PPP and ICNI protocols. Messages can be created as ASCII strings or as space delimited hexadecimal number strings. The checksum and framing utility assumes that the message is a string of numbers. A string of hexadecimal numbers is converted to data bytes when transmitted.

Received messages can be view as raw hexadecimal/ASCII data or parsed into message frames with time stamps for Synchronous HDLC, Asynchronous HDLC (PPP, LAPB, LAPD) and ICNI protocols.

This is the most powerful and easiest to use protocol analyzer ever. Now you can get down to debugging the protocol, without having to fight the tool.

Source code:
The source code of WinHexCom is a good source of serial protocol code. It can detect and initialize PC ports and run the X-modem, X-modem 1k and X-modem CRC (a.k.a. Y-modem) protocols and has simple implementations of HDLC and PPP framing. So, if you need serial port and CRC code, get your copy here, don't re-invent the wheel.

Coming attractions:
We are always willing to add proprietary protocols on request and perform bug fixes as they are discovered/reported.

Version Description - April 2003

Version 4.5
a. Fixed USB Serial RS232 Support for Bill McPheeters. Now you can use it with a Laptop PC and a USB adapter.
b. Fixed a bug with higher COM port numbers, which caused the above problem.
c. Fixed receiver restart after a file transfer.

Version 4.0

Fixed a problem with the message buffer horizontal scrolling. Edit and send of large messages will now always work.

Version 3.40
a. Enlarged all buffer sizes. You can now send 1024 byte messages. I never thought that anybody would want to send messages larger than 256 bytes by hand, but I was mistaken about the lengths some people have to go to...
b. Fixed a bug in the CRC32 algorithm. It seems that Alexander Firsov is the only person on the planet that uses CRC32, since nobody else ever complained.

Version 3.30
a. Add save of last 10 messages to a configuration file (For registered users only.).

Version 3.20

a. Fixed a PPP framing bug. When escaping control codes, the data should be XORed with 20H.

Version 3.11

a. ANSI Emulation improved, but still very basic

Version 3.10

a. ASCII (TTY) terminal display fixed
b. Buffer overrun while Stopped fixed

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Get more information here

Download a free demonstration version now!

Here is a screen image of the full WinHexCom version 3.00

(Click the graphic for the full image.)

Corporate Users
Single User Licence:US $100
(no source code).

Enterprise Licence: US $500
An Enterprise licence includes the ANSI C source code, so you can add your own proprietary protocol parsers.

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Home Users
Home users can use WinHexCom free of charge for hobyist purposes, but if you feel that we are going to starve if you don't pay, then a pizza voucher would be welcome...

The difference between Licenced and Unlicenced versions:
Nothing much...
A licence key will change the little nag messages into your company's name and allow you to save the settings - that's all.
BUT A licence entitles you to 1 year of free upgrades and if a licenced user reports a bug, we'll try our best to fix it in 2 days or less and if you want us to add a special protocol parser, then it will help if you buy a licence...

WinDent - C Pretty Printer

Windows dialogue version of the famous C Pretty Printer Indent, first released with BSD and currently maintained by Sun, under the GNU license.

WinDent, uses the last and best C version of Indent, version 1.10, with a Windows front end (later versions are C++). This enables one to run it from a batch file, with file names on the command line, or as a standalone Windows application, with multiple file Drag and Drop capability. This makes WinDent the easiest to use, most powerful and versatile C pretty printer ever.

The adaptation for Windows was performed by Jacob Navia and Herman Oosthuysen - no copyright is reserved and all sources are included. If you improve the code, please send us a copy.

Download the FREE WinDent121.Zip file.

PTT - Perfect Text Tools

This is a windows dialog program made to convert WordPerfect (Corel Corp) document files to plain text, HTML or XML. This utility was created when we were faced with the monstrous problem of converting several thousand legacy WordPerfect files to a form that can be read by modern word processors. One of the problems being that new versions of WordPerfect, doesn't read version 4 documents anymore. So if you have an archive of really old documents, then PTT will save your day.

PTT is therefore aimed at the rapid conversion of large archives of documents into a readable format and not so much aimed at the precise conversion of individual documents. Some formatting is preserved, but tables and columnar text will all be converted in a simple fashion. You will however get the complete text of the document, which is the most important thing.

Very easy to use: Drag and drop a few hundred files on PTT and let it rapidly convert them all unattended. PTT will detect the source file formats and convert them appropriately.

PTT will convert legacy .WP, W51 and modern .WPD files to plain text, HTML or XML, while preserving as much of the original formatting as possible. Unrecognized file types will be processed using a simpler algorithm, which may require some cleanup after conversion.

OpenOffice.Org Support, as from Ver 4.3, Aug 2002

PTT has now been updated to output Compressed XML files in OpenOffice.org or StarOffice format. At the moment, this is still very rudimentary. The contents of all WP 4/5/6/7/8/9 document files are converted properly, but most fancy formatting is lost in the process. However, the results are perfectly useable for most purposes.

Version 4.3 now handles Bold and Italics XML styles properly; more styles to follow.

The zip.exe utility of the Info-Zip project is used to perform the compression for the OpenOffice.org format and is included in the distribution. Unzip the file ptt4.zip somewhere on your hard disk and always keep zip.exe and ptt4.exe in the same directory, so that PTT can find the zip utility.

We will add more styles to preserve more of your document formatting in future versions. Come and look in a few weeks for a new version.

Linux: Note that PTT works on wine. We tested it with Codeweaver's CrossOver Office. Native Linux filters are in the works as well.

Known XML Problems: The zip utility doesn't like filenames containing spaces, so don't do that.

Download a fully functional shareware copy.

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Golay 24,12 Error Correction

Forward error correction can be used effectively to increase the throughput of an unreliable channel. Hamming codes are commonly used to effect this.

The Golay 24,12 algorithm is a perfect half rate code. Encoding of Golay 24,12 is relatively easy, but decoding is a chore and most implementations take the easy way out and create an exhaustive look-up table, which would be 8K words in size. However, it is possible to use a couple of very small look-up tables to very good effect, instead of one huge table. This makes it possible to use the Golay code in a memory constrained embedded system.

Here is an example program that demonstrates a unique variation on the Kasami Error Trapping decode technique, using two very small look-up tables of only 16 words each. This provides a speed-up of about 10,000 times over the LFSR decode method and is only marginally slower than an exhaustive table of 8000 words!

Download the Golay2412.zip file here.