by Nostrodomos

With the amount of attrition of personal web sites on the Internet, and avatar artists disappearing from Comic Chat communities, their works of avatar art have become orphaned. There are those Comic Chatters out there now that enjoy their character, and would like to use their avatar, but the URL that the chosen avatar downloads from is defunct. This is known as a dead avatar.

What you'll need first is a capable, easy to use, advertisementless and nag-messageless, yet FREE (Nostrodomos can be demanding) hex editor. Fortunately, one exists called Freeware Hex Editor XVI32. Download it quick before hexing avatars becomes illegal under the Patriot Act and you find yourself in front of a military tribunal without a lawyer after having sat uncharged in a federal prison for a year and a half.

The procedure to hexing the avatar is simple.
  • Make a back-up copy of the avatar.
  • Open the avatar with the hex editor.
  • Ascertain the fully-qualified URL from the file.
  • Count the number of characters in the URL.
  • Replace the orphaned URL with your valid new URL.
  • Upload the avatar and start chatting it up.
Make a back-up copy of the avatar. Hexing is dangerous in the sense that if you screw up, it screws up the file, and it's no longer usable. We wouldn't want that to happen, so make a copy of the file and throw it somewhere safe, just in case.

Install the hex editor, and run the program. Open up your avatar patient. In this tutorial, we will use XmasTiki.avb as an example.

The opened binary file looks like this:

Figure 1: XVI32 and the XmasTiki.avb

It isn't as complicated as it looks. If you look over at the right side of the form, where the white boxes are, you will see a selected "h" character. You will also notice that just happens to be the beginning of the URL. The URL ends 4 rows down with the "b" character. The actual dead URL for this avatar is:

http://www.aliengalaxy.net/downloads/avatars/XmasTiki.avb

The URL is 57 characters in length. You can arrive at this value by counting the individual characters.
Sniffles has brought to Nostrodomos's attention that some people have been confused by a URL that begins with ftp://. This is simply an FTP URL. A URL is a Universal Resource Locator, and not something used exclusively on the World Wide Web. For those who find this mysterious, treat the ftp:// as you would the http://, as part of the URL, and just overwrite as you would normally as described below.

The next task is to make a new valid URL of the same length. This is important. If you hex a URL that is not of the same character length, you will have destroyed that AVB. It won't erupt in flames and shoot comic character shrapnel across the comic strip at supersonic speeds, but the file will become unusable in Comic Chat.

When designing the new URL, Nostrodomos finds that placing the dead URL and new URL in a text file for comparison simplifies the process. As you can see in Figure 2, it's quite easy to compare the file lengths this way. Make sure to use a monospaced font, such as Courier, Courier New, or Terminal.

Figure 2: "Side by Side" URL comparison.

You may have to become creative to find a new URL that will work for you on your web site or FTP server. You may have to create a directory or two. It's better form to retain the original filename, instead of adding pad characters. For example, a better URL would be:

http://avatars.tikiopolis.com/comics/avatars/XmasTiki.avb

as compared to this filename disaster (Nostrodomos has actually seen avatars named this way):

http://avatars.tikiopolis.com/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxXmasTiki.avb

One should avoid filenames greater that 8 characters and also retain the original filename as a tribute to the avatar's author. And don't forget the file extension (.avb).

Make sure to test the new URL. You can do this with the Verifying the Avatar Download URL procedure.

There are also alot of hosting sites that use web servers that run on the UNIX operating system. This is worthy of mentioning because the UNIX file system is case-sensitive. That means XmasTiki.avb and xmastiki.avb and XmasTiki.AVB are all different filenames, so make sure to test the URL before hexing the avatar. Nostrodomos therefore recommends that you also preserve the case of the letters in the filename to avoid any problems. Please note this also applies to directory names as well (Thanks goes to Sniffles for reminding Nostrodomos of this).

Once the URL is proven as valid, we can proceed to the big step, changing the text value inside the binary AVB file.
  • Copy the new URL into the Clipboard by selecting the new URL in the text editor and pressing on your keyboard CONTROL+INSERT.

  • In the hex editor, make sure the first character of the dead URL, the "h" is selected.

  • From the hex editor's Edit menu, select Overwrite string..."

Figure 3: Overwriting the dead URL with the valid URL.


  • Paste the valid URL into the Text String text box by pressing on the keyboard SHIFT+INSERT.

Figure 4: Pasting the valid URL

  • Press the OK button. You'll see that the new valid URL has replaced the old dead URL.

  • Save the file. You're done hexing.

  • Upload the file.

  • Test the avatar, and see if it works. Hook up with a chat buddy, have him or her delete their local copy of the avatar (if they had it), and see if they can download your newly hexed copy in a Comic Chat room.


This tutorial brought to you by

Tutorials Tikiopolis Home